For Halloween-set horror films that aren’t Halloween, 1988’s Night of the Demons is a fun night’s rental that quickly earned cult-classic status. Annnnnd Night of the Demons 3 is a sequel.
En route to an All Hallows’ Eve costume party, two high school good girls (Patricia Rodriguez and Decoys’ Stephanie Bauder) encounter car trouble. They reluctantly accept a ride from a van full of their no-good classmates swapping “yo mama” jokes. The most juvenile delinquent of the bunch (Kris Holden-Reid, Habitat) demands a stop at Quicky Mart for smokes and ends up shotgunning a cop.
To hide from the police, they head to Hull House, the old, abandoned funeral parlor. It’s still haunted by the witchy woman Angela (a crazy-eyed Amelia Kinkade), who specializes in sexually charged pranks. Few, if any, of the teens will live to see daylight. Probably not the girl (Tara Slone) with her hand in a sock-puppet snake that Angela turns into a real reptile that slithers straight to the crotch. And definitely not the dweeb (Christian Tessier, Battlefield Earth) who asks Angela if she can “suck a golf ball through 10 feet of garden hose,” to which she responds by fellating his gun … then spitting the bullets into his palm.
Previous installments were directed by such VHS-era horror faves as Kevin S. Tenney (Witchboard) and Brian Trenchard-Smith (Dead-End Drive-In), whereas Night of the Demons 3 comes to us from one Jimmy Kaufman, who’s helmed a lot of Canadian television. He likely was eager to live a little, which could account for this entry containing the most leering nude-teen shots of the franchise — and I do mean leering, as if it were shot with a zoom lens across the street.
And that’s about the most effort we see put into this tired threequel. I enjoyed Vlasta Vrana (Brainscan) in a showy part as the magic-obsessed police lieutenant, but he’s the only one invested. Even Kinkade, whose kitchen pantry likely depended on this gig, seems to be running on fumes, which at least corresponds with the production value. Other than an ill-received 2009 remake, this was it for the series — about 85 minutes too late. —Rod Lott