DEMON-icon

The Demon is a title that many hor­ror fans know from its fre­quent appear­ances on “all-time worst hor­ror film” lists.  It’s cer­tainly got all the hall­marks of a bad movie: from the dia­logue and the plot­ting to the action and mise en scene, there’s noth­ing here that works the way it is intended to.  However, that doesn’t mean it is a for­get­table expe­ri­ence.  The Demon is an utterly bizarre expe­ri­ence on a num­ber of lev­els, eccen­tric in ways that its “bad movie” tag doesn’t fully pre­pare you for.

The odd­ness starts with the film’s dis­con­nected nar­ra­tive.  The open­ing scene begins with a mother being attacked in her home by a mys­te­ri­ous assailant who steals away with her daugh­ter.  The father brings in Colonel Bill Carson (Cameron Mitchell), an ex-military man with psy­chic abil­i­ties, to deter­mine if their daugh­ter is still alive and per­haps find the killer.

However, the above sce­nario is not the main plot of the film.  You see, our killer — who wears black gloves with sharp tips that unfor­tu­nately resem­ble the busi­ness end of a bot­tle opener — is attack­ing women all over the film’s unnamed city.  He seems to be cir­cling his way towards two tar­gets who form the major­ity of the film’s loose plot: Mary (Jennifer Holmes) and her cousin Jo (Zoli Markey) work at a nurs­ery school.  Things seem nor­mal in their world until Mary starts to sense she is being spied on by the killer.  It’s inevitable that the two women will come face with this menace.

That said, no one could’ve guess the cir­cuitous, some­times oblique route that the film takes to its inevitable cat-and-mouse finale.  The Demon often feels like the prod­uct of mis­fir­ing synapses, spew­ing out ele­ments that never con­nect.  The Colonel sput­ters and pon­tif­i­cates about the killer but never comes up with a real clue.  No attempt is ever made to present a back­ground or motive for the face­less killer.  Mary seems to be our hero­ine but Jo gets more screen time via a sub­plot about her rela­tion­ship with a young play­boy, which includes some of the most mind-bending attempts at hip roman­tic dia­logue you’ve ever heard.  A neigh­bor who sus­pects some­thing bad is intro­duced and cut away to sev­eral times dur­ing the third act but is never worked into the finale.  Nothing in this film adds up, ever.

The mise en scene makes the story feel even stranger than these descrip­tions make it sound.  Most of the attacks hap­pen at night and are lit so dimly that strug­gling to see what hap­pen­ing becomes part of the “sus­pense.”  Anything remotely hor­rific is accom­pa­nied by a screechy blast of blood-and-thunder style hor­ror movie music that feels like it was woven in from a film about two decades older than this one.  One attack scene works in a motor­cy­cle crash and explo­sion for no appar­ent rea­son.  Mary spends a good multiple-minute stretch of the finale top­less before don­ning a makeshift shower cur­tain pon­cho to face off with him — and wait ’til you see the ‘Last House On The Left meets MacGyver’ tac­tics she uses to take him on.

And the fer­mented cherry atop this lyser­gic schlock sun­dae is a furi­ously hammy per­for­mance by Cameron Mitchell.  This one-time lead­ing man turned char­ac­ter actor has long been a favorite with Your Humble Reviewer for the wild per­for­mances he gave in schlock fare dur­ing the 1970’s and 1980’s.  His work in The Toolbox Murders is still the golden stan­dard in this area but his work in The Demon is fas­ci­nat­ing.  He bab­bles non-sequiturs about “hal­lu­ci­nat­ing evil”, huffs and puffs dur­ing his visions like he’s about to have an aneurysm and at one point fran­ti­cally snorts a pil­low belong­ing to the miss­ing girl before rip­ping it to shreds.  The film­mak­ers def­i­nitely got their money’s worth out of Mitchell and his crazed antics are the main rea­son for the film’s promi­nence in the annals of junk-horror.

In short, The Demon is not a film that can be rec­om­mended in good con­science nor is as lively as better-known bad movie favorites… but there’s a quiet, dead­pan weird­ness to all of its ele­ments that is likely to haunt your mem­ory long after you view it.  It’s the kind of trashy, throw­away fare that is best viewed in the wee hours of the morn­ing, when its non­sen­si­cal, frag­mented qual­ity will play like a fever dream for your tired mind.  If you’re a schlock scholar, the film is worth see­ing — but you’d bet­ter steel your­self before pick­ing up this par­tic­u­lar bad-film gauntlet.