What happens when a speedometer-cable factory worker mortgages his house, car and furniture, and takes two weeks of “sick leave” to make what he’s certain will be “a masterpiece” of horror cinema? Something far short of that, as demonstrated by that eventual film, 1977’s The Demon Lover, and this warts-and-all documentary on its making, with apologies to the word “making.”
Never officially released commercially and not likely to, Demon Lover Diary was captured by the camera of Joel DeMott as her boyfriend, Jeff Kreines, volunteers to shoot the debut film of his friend, the aforementioned toiler Donald G. Jackson, who co-directed with Jerry Younkins, an arrogant hothead who cut off his own finger to get $8,000 of insurance money to fund their dream. They should have dreamed harder.
Don and Jerry are revealed less as creative geniuses and more as temper-prone diva babies. For some reason, they don’t want the donated efforts of a sound man, Jeff’s buddy Mark Rance; Don deceives his kindly mother, at whose house they’re crashing; and one of their recruited female stars is missing one of her front teeth. Plus, she’s 14 — a year for every scheduled day of principal photography.
While Don and Jerry claim to have worked their asses off, Jeff, Joel and Mark instead find an extremely disorganized set. Don won’t help move any equipment: “A director really shouldn’t be carrying anything. I’m carrying the weight of the whole film.” The only continuity among their scenes, Jeff notes, is stupidity. Don and Jerry are all talk and no action: “We think we’re going to come up with the best low-budget horror movie ever made,” says Jerry.
They didn’t. All this and a cameo by a belching Ted Nugent! —Rod Lott
I think Jackson and Younkins were talentless dimwits, but there are bits of the doc that are very obviously manufactured for drama; if I recall, there’s a bit near the end where DeMott is gripeing about some problems over shots of kids on a see-saw which I guess is supposed to set up the very phony ending of them speeding off and the tacked on voice-over of “ohmigawd they’re shooting at us!” And to be fair, if there was somebody shooting a doc of Sam Raimi on the original EVIL DEAD shoot, he’d have come just as badly.
In that end scene, they’ve quit the production and have fled, and are overly paranoid they’re being followed by Jackson and his posse, mostly because of all the guns and live ammo they got from Nugent. It just kind of ends without any real resolution, so maybe they should’ve staged a shootout!
A faked shoot-out would’ve been nice; there probably wasn’t any gun shots to start with so they could’ve just faked their deaths for a year. (And as an aside, Bruce Campbell did indeed contact Jackson in researching EVIL DEAD if Jackson’s interview in Psychotronic Video is true.)