When I popped the Night of the Demons remake into my machine, I did so with complete certainty that no matter how much it sucked, I would still prefer it to the 1988 original. Y’see, I came to the first Night late into the game, so instead of nursing fond teenage memories of that crazy film where that chick sticks a lipstick container into her boob, I instead think of it as 90 minutes spent with the most singularly obnoxious collection of horror movie assholes I’ve ever seen.
As the remake started, however, I found my faith tested. Once again, the screenwriters seemed to mistake having their characters insult each other for the first 20 minutes as a witty form of character development.
It isn’t, screenwriters. It really, really, isn’t.
Eventually, the demons appeared at the Halloween party and the characters grew less overtly hateful, and while I never actually found myself enjoying the film, it also never tortured me as much as the original. It is interesting to note that in the remake’s recreation of the infamous lipstick-in-the-tit scene, Diora Baird’s fake fake boobs look much more fake than Linnea Quigley’s original fake fake boobs, which suggests the art of fake-boob prosthesis is the one special effect that hasn’t advanced much in the intervening years.
Speaking of Quigley, she has a short cameo at the beginning. It made me sad. As did the performances of pretty much the rest of the cast, none of whom actually seem to want to be associated with the film — the worst offender being Shannon Elizabeth (completely miscast as Goth queen Angela), whose only remotely authentic moment comes in the scene where she fellates a wine bottle.
So, yeah, the terrible remake of Night of the Demons is pretty fucking terrible, but not as terrible as the terrible original, which I believe sets the terrible standard for horror movie terrible. Terrible progress? —Allan Mott