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Underlit Incoherent Junk... And Loving It!

posted 9 years ago by Hermies_Purrbuckets
2 replies | jump to latest

There is something about this movie. It's random, generic quality. The washed-out, boring photography. The lack of a coherent plot. The strange lack of identifying cultural markers. The strange clash of "disco meets hippy" culture. The complete absence of character motivation. The shameless use of gratuitous nudity. If this is the first Halloween clone, then it is certainly the best, because it strips bare the mind-numbing pretentiousness of that John Carpenter mess, and shows what drive-in horror movies are at heart: 90 minutes of killing time, with murder and nudity along the way. This is something the late, great anti-filmmaker Jerry Warren might have made, and be proud of. More of a meditation on a genre than a narrative in any traditional sense of the word, The Demon is, if anything, a sly riff on the horror movies of the 1970s, where anything - and nothing - went. Personally, I find it entirely entrancing; its obstinate refusal to compel the viewer makes it a cinematic enigma worthy of note.

[–] MikeJackKearney 8 years ago

You liked it for exactly the same reason I did.

It's so oddly structured. The Cameron Mitchell/Parker family/random city attacks and the Mary/Jo/Dean storylines absolutely refuse to intersect. They feel like two episodes of some crusty 70's crime TV show, smooshed together to make a film.

I also like how, the few times you actually get a look at his face, the Demon himself doesn't look very threatening. In fact, he kinda looks like Charles Grodin.

The movie raises a lot of questions. Is anyone working the front desk at that crappy apartment building where the Demon lives? Is he actually paying for his room, or did he just move in? If he's paying for it, how did he communicate with the landlord? Why does everyone have a different accent? I get that Mary and Jo are from two different parts of the world, but it's never really clear who's supposed to be visiting whom, and where they're supposed to live. Apparently, American Mary is supposed to live there full-time with her parents and it's her South African cousin who's visiting, but then that American dude the cousin is banging mentions that he's far from the US as well (?). Never mind that the Demon is watching Mary change in the dressing room, why is the ladies changing room in full view of the mall anyway? Why does Mary put on a shower cap before she kills the Demon?

[–] Dan_Garten 8 years ago

Good review.