No it's not that Night Of The Demon. This is the video nasty one. Number 34 opens on an arresting image. A man camping in the woods has his entire arm ripped off by something monstrous and as he lies dying, the pints of blood spilling out of him fill a fresh footprint in the ground. A huge footprint. That looks vaguely apelike! When you get something like this in a nasty it's a surprise. You realise there's some effort thrown into the film you're about to watch. Not much now mind you but enough to help you enjoy it.
The man who's arm was ripped off was Carla Thomas's father and she wants answers and to get them she's gone to anthropology professor Bill Nugent who's instantly intrigued by the rumours he's heard of a Bigfoot haunting the forests of Northern California. People are being ripped asunder but the cops just don't want to know so Bill, Carla and a gang of his students head north to investigate. They camp out on the land of an old farmer who warns them to stay away from the woods but when he's pushed and bribed he tells them about a loner called Wanda who lives deep in the wilderness. What they find out about her might just change the course of science. If they make it out alive that is...
This one is better than you've heard. It's terribly acted and a fair chunk of it is quite hard to make out because it's so dark but it has a story that's actually kind of decent, damning the horrors of religion and glaring at police corruption while remembering to pace itself properly as well. Too many of the nasties keep all their action for the very end of the story but here you get something wet and gooey every 7 or 8 minutes to keep things moving as we get graphic flashbacks of the creature's misdeeds as told to his students by Professor Nugent. Limbs are torn off, people in sleeping bags are impaled on branches, scouts are crushed against each other and loving couples are murdered while........ahem.. in flagrante delicto. In the film's most notorious scene a biker takes a whizz onto a bush in which the creature is snoozing and gets his bits and bobs torn off and of course director James C. Wasson has to treat us to a close up of the squirting stump.
It's this scene that caused all the trouble of course. It's no surprise to hear that this didn't get a cinema release and first hit British shores on video, courtesy of Vipco releases. Vipco, you may remember were arguably the company who started off the whole nasties hysteria when their lurid choice of artwork for Driller Killer caught the eye of Mary Whitehouse and in 1982 they were pumping out uncut versions of gory horror films to take advantage of the unregulated home video market. Night Of The Demon was brought to the attention of the British Board Of Film Classification in 1983 and was prosecuted for obscenity a few months later. Nowadays it's hard to believe owning a film like this could get you into big trouble with the 5-0 but 38 years ago all bets were off. The film stayed banned until 1994 when a rebooted version of Vipco managed to get the film a home release but this time it had been shorn of 1 minute 41 seconds of blood and guts and surprisingly this is still the only version of the film legally available in the UK and Ireland. Ahh the wonders of youtube eh?
It's a nasty you rarely hear mentioned in conversations about the infamous 39 but it should be. It goes to places you'd never expect and is brave enough to deviate wildly away from the slasher film it seems to be at first. Halfway through it goes full on hillbilly horror before veering into devil worship and ending up as it's own version of Night Of The Living Dead. It's the ending that finishes the film on a high when the professor and his students finally get proof that what they are investigating is definitely not an urban myth and we get to witness what happens when a room full of bad actors meets an angry Bigfoot. Intestines used as nunchuks you say? It's all here and it's.....it's a sight to behold.
Does Night Of The Demon deserve it's nasty status? Nope, but the BBFC and their stringent and idiotic checklists seemed to think so.
Is it worth a watch? Yep. It at least tries to be good and that already makes better a lot of the others on the list.
Next up : Snuff. Boredom and disgust in equal measure.
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