Night of the Demon is a 1980 Bigfoot horror film. Directed by James C Wasson and starring Michael Cutt (Volcano) and Paul Kelleher (Spirits of the Fall). The film appeared on the original video nasties list due to "gory mayhem".
The movie is told as a flashback from the perspective of Professor Nugent, an anthropology professor who takes his students on a field trip to look for bigfoot. After recounting several grisly incidents in the classroom (again in flashback format) they take to the hills where they locate local landowner Lou Carlson and get him to spill the beans on his own Sasquatch encounters. This eventually leads them to discover a cannibalistic, pagan cult lurking in the woods and, in turn, links them to "crazy Wanda", a local woman who has had some serious bigfoot encounters. She regails them with her tale of being raped by bigfoot and producing a lovechild before the beast storms the cabin and lays waste to our overly curious heroes.
Night of the Demon is utterly incomprehensible. Most of the film is told through a flashback, and sometimes flashbacks within flashbacks, and it's never clear who is relating the scene or how it fits into the time line. The editing is psychotic, the acting hideous and the soundtrack endlessly irritating. The "mayhem" that landed it on the video nasties list is laughable and the effects are pretty shoddy for the time.
However, the real draw with this movie is the ambition and creativity with which the bigfoot creature maims and kills his victims. The attempts to further the plot are certainly tedious, but when bigfoot gets going, it's like a mix tape of things you thought you'd never see in a movie. This includes bigfoot raping a young girl, a sleeping bag hammer throw, intestine flailing, forcing girl scouts to have a knife fight, ritualistic gimp sex and, most famously, ripping the dick off a biker.
Like many video nasties, night of the demon is an appallingly made film and a real struggle to get through. Those who do will be rewarded with schlocky violence and really quite perverse sex scenes. If you're a bigfoot or video nasty completist then it may be worth a watch, otherwise you may never get these 95 minutes back.
* 1 Star
Have you managed to see the movie? Do you know any other Bigfoot movies?
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