When anthropology professor Nugent leads five students into the forest to find Bigfoot, well, bad things happen. We know this because the whole of Night of the Demon is presented as a flashback, with the professor (Michael Cutt, Hider in the House) spilling the cryptozoological tea to doctors and the sheriff from the confines of his cheap hospital bed.
What he conveys is — and isn’t — your typical sasquatch tale. Yes, all the expected elements are present and accounted for (such as the camping collegiates hearing strange sounds at night), along with ones you wouldn’t (like, oh, stumbling onto a sex cult). Yes, Nugent and his pupils eventually meet Bigfoot — and how! — but also a local yokel known as Crazy Wanda (Melanie Graham). Used and abused by her fundamentalist father (“I’m saving your soul, you ungrateful bitch!”), Wanda’s a simple-minded, Sissy Spacek-esque waif whose baby is the product of Bigfoot rape.
With the unasked question of “What would Bigfoot’s face look like at the point of orgasm?” answered, it’s safe to say Night of the Demon ventures miles and miles beyond Boggy Creek.
The coupling is hardly all the craziness contained, as Nugent relays many an episodic cutaway to explicitly gory Bigfoot encounters for which he was not present. Some of these find the 6 feet of Crisco-enabled mange:
• yanking an old man’s arm clean from the socket
• whirling a poor sap in a sleeping bag overhead, ‘round and ‘round like a goddamn pinwheel until the sack of meat is impaled on a tree
• slamming two knife-wielding Girl Scouts together in a manner that they inadvertently saw one another’s arm
• giving a woodsman a shoulder massage with his own ax
• and, most famously, rudely depriving a bush-pissing motorcyclist of his penis
Nugent’s group is hardly untouched, starting with one student having his head smashed against a tree, leaving what appears to be the remains of a meatball sub with extra sauce. It all culminates in a cabin siege that tops, well, everything to which your eyeballs have been privy up to now. Here and there, porn director James C. Wasson (What the Big Boys Eat) puts the audience in Bigfoot’s POV, visually marked by red around the frame’s edges, giving Bigfoot the most bloodshot eyes possible without stepping inside Matthew McConaughey’s man cave.
Despite a title paving the expectation for Ol’ Scratch instead of a sasquatch, Night of the Demon is the Bigfoot movie you wish every Bigfoot movie had been. —Rod Lott