In 1983, the Director Of Public Prosecutions published its first list of movies which were tagged with the tabloid-friendly label of Video Nasties. These cinematic outliers were deemed to have to power to deprave and corrupt and, if the title in question had been successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, any dealer stocking it could be fined or jailed. In one case, involving Romano Scavolini’s Nightmares In A Damaged Brain, one of its distributors was sentenced to eighteen months in prison (eventually reduced to six months on appeal, but sheesh).
It was a heady time, driven by moral outrage, framed as a battle for the very soul of the United Kingdom, and the seventy-two films that appeared at one time or another on that DPP list attained a level of notoriety their filmmakers never expected (unless, arguably, you were Umberto Lenzi). Thirty-nine remained banned, thirty-three were dropped from the list. All of them became must see items, of course.
As the memory of those crazy days fades and those of us who lived through the Nasties era scratch our heads and wonder what all of that hysteria was about, did those movies actually threaten the fabric of society as we knew it? Let’s take a look at another…
NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1980, dir. James C. Wasson)
*** THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS ***
Professor Bill Nugent (Michael Cutt) takes four of his students on an anthropological field trip into the woods of Northern California with the goal of proving the existence of Bigfoot. Also tagging along is Carla Thomas (Shannon Cooper), a young woman whose father was found dead in those aforementioned woods and suspects his murder was carried out by the legendary creature. It didn’t just do for Carla’s dad, either, as several other brutal, unsolved killings have been attributed to the hulking brute, despite local police dismissing this theory as nothing but a hoax. Of course, the expedition is going to go horrendously wrong…
The initial UK video release of Night Of The Demon, courtesy of Iver Film Services (“The professionals at Pinewood”), featured a rather uninspiring cover picture of a moonlit night, so it’s strange that anyone gave this a second glance when it came to calling the video cops for offensive content. Ah, hold on, what was the text on that front cover? “Warning – this film contains scenes of extreme and explicit violence”. Yeah, fair enough, that would do it.
James C. Wasson’s flick stayed on the DPP list for the duration and only resurfaced in 1994, when the BBFC imposed a minute and forty-one seconds of cuts to various violent moments along the way, including some intestine flinging and, in a flashback that most viewers will remember, a biker stops for a roadside wee and has his dick ripped off in glorious colour. In subsequent years, British channel Zone Horror broadcast the uncut version and in 2022 it landed itself a decent Blu-ray treatment complete with second disc of extras.
The story kicks off in a hospital, as a masked, doped up, seriously injured Nugent proves surprisingly clear in the speech department, considering it’s been mentioned that the bottom half of his face has been burned off. Still, let’s not allow medical facts to get in the way of a preamble, as our narrator is told to begin at the beginning – that’s actual dialogue – and warns that those horror stories you heard about in the forest are true. On with the gory slaughter!
At this point, I feel it necessary to point out that as gruesome as the killings are, they’re undermined slightly by the strawberry sauce colour of the blood and often undercut further by the low wattage emoting on display. Following the pecker punishment dished out to the biker, he staggers back towards his transport saying “No!” and “Oh no!” as he sprays the surrounding area with claret, seemingly in about as much pain as he would be had he banged his elbow.
As Nugent’s party takes a while to make their way through the wilderness and uncover the clues leading them to a woman known as Crazy Wanda, their trek is broken up with previous tales of Bigfoot’s killing spree, which amounts to a series of ridiculous shorts as it bumps off not only our unfortunate motorcyclist, but a couple in a van, two Girl Scouts (in apparel bearing the legend “Girl Scouts”) and a woodsman who gets offed with his own axe.
The van sequence is particularly amusing in that it’s splatter free, but it creates an opportunity to crowbar in some T&A as the imaginatively named Van Lover and Van Lover (I’m quoting the end credits here) get not very hot or heavy before the monster drags the bloke out of the back of the vehicle and then hauls him onto the roof for no other reason than to have the terrified lass hear all of the external banging (as opposed to the unsexy internal banging) and then die of fright, as her beau takes what seems like ten minutes to slide his face a tiny bit down one of the windows.
Nugent’s description of these deaths appears to lean towards terms such as “horribly mutilated”, but in general there’s not a great deal of horrible mutilation going on until the climax of the movie, at which point the pieces fall into place as to Crazy Wanda’s role in the proceedings and Nugent’s posse, plus the Prof himself, are trapped in a cabin which is set upon by Bigfoot. This leading to sweeping reductions in the remaining cast as folks are on the receiving end of saw blade, pitchfork, broken glass and hot plate violence.
At the time of Night Of The Demon’s release, there weren’t all that many movies featuring the potential existence of Bigfoot, let alone one that leaned into mean-spirited violence with such abandon. The wobbly thesping doesn’t do the drama any favours, but there are still a few genuinely disturbing moments, particularly during the Crazy Wanda backstory, gleaned from a spot of hypnosis which turns out to be one of Nugent’s many talents. It’s a shame that, when it comes to his list of skills, realising he’s wandering into a death trap wasn’t one of them.
As for the monster, the design has just enough of the uncanny about it to be disconcerting while still possessing recognisably human qualities. It’s a bit of a shame that it doesn’t look all that convincing up close, but most of the mayhem from the hairy executioner is observed at a distance, which throws the focus on the destruction of the many idiots who blunder across its path, rather than an unnerving but practically-limited face design which doesn’t move much. There’s also a red-tinged “Demon Vision” POV which looks a bit like the opening titles of the ITV Thriller series without the fish-eye lens, but there are no Devil Hunter-style eyesight problems hindering the pursuit of the next unlucky victim.
Undemanding slasher fans might get a kick out of this urban legend retooled as body count pic, especially as Nugent’s newbies are by turns bland and stupid enough to not trouble the viewer one bit if they become sasquatch fodder. They blather on about nothing much and then react to dire threats by moping about and showing so little initiative that it’s amazing they didn’t wander off a cliff long before their confrontation with the backwoods beast. There’s even a spark of coy romance, as a couple of characters brush fingers across a chess piece. Look, they’re touching fingers! They’re talking about going to Hawaii! Isn’t that cute? Well, maybe to some, but at that moment I couldn’t wait for Bigfoot to show up and put both them and the audience out of their misery.
To be fair, there’s no sentimentality when it comes to how the plot deals with most of the characters in Night Of The Demon and that includes someone like Carla, who would normally survive to the end having already lost someone to the Big Bad. Spoiler: not here, although she dies in relatively unspectacular fashion. It’s Crazy Wanda who gets the pass at the end, sitting placidly in her rocking chair as everyone else in her cabin gets taken out or, in the case of Nugent, given a crispy coating and ending up being declared criminally insane, as his detailed account is dismissed as the ramblings of a madman.
Considering the claims made on behalf on some video fodder in the 1980s, at least Night Of The Demon makes good on its promise of explicit violence and it’s not difficult to see why the BBFC wasn’t keen on allowing the unexpurgated version to foul the rental shop shelves given the rampant hysteria of the time. Nowadays, as with a number of the Nasties, it’s puzzling to see what all of the fuss was about. The bloodthirsty bits mostly come across as daft, not helped by some of the least convincing reactions to being grievously injured you’re likely to see. My personal favourite is the “AH! OH! WHOA!” combo as Van Lover 1 is killed in rubbish fashion.
Night Of The Demon is sporadically, effectively weird, but the performances and frequently clunky writing ultimately scupper what could otherwise have been a minor indie treat, especially as this plumps for a cryptid menace rather than the era’s penchant for yet another nutcase with a knife. The Stuart Hardy score, which veers between light jazz flute arrangements and unorthodox, honking stabs of synth, matches the overall feeling of familiar, almost banal ground being covered in the main, but frequently giving way to something odder and darker. Even the end credits are peculiar; a mix of fonts and caption styles which use various, inconsistent portions of the screen – only the top third in one case, which makes me wonder if they ran out of folks to shout out or remembered a few of them at the last minute. But hey, we’re not here to pick holes in closing titles and if it’s gore you’re after, this may provide fleeting satisfaction. However, keep in mind that extreme violence of a 1980 vintage may not be the extreme violence you would expect of today.