Plot
A bunch of stereotypically imbecilic high school students decide to throw a Halloween party at “Hull House”, an abandoned suburban mortuary with a long, grisly history. The party proceeds normally enough with drinking and dancing until Angela gets the bright idea to hold a séance which accidentally releases a demon. The foul entity crashes the party, possessing the teens’ bodies one after another, transforming them into revolting, man-eating monstrosities.
Well, you can’t say they weren’t warned: “I don’t care what you all think. My daddy was a preacher. And I know better than to be in here fooling with this stuff. This is a house of the dead. And I’m gettin’ out now before it’s too late“.
I've heard stories about this place ever since I was a kid.
Critique
4Clearly inspired by Lamberto Bava’s “Demons” (1985) as well as Sam Raimi’s eternal classic “The Evil Dead” (1981), Kevin Tenney’s “Night of the Demons” is the classic 1980’s B movie, dripping with blood and every other imaginable bodily fluid (the makeup and special effects still hold up today). But as far as the plot goes, the story sputters before taking off, and even when it does achieve cruising altitude, the boredom level still manages to increase exponentially as the minutes tick by.
The scatological stupidity demonstrated by a good number of the characters – who seem closely related to the dim-bulb gang led by Suicide in “The Return of the Living Dead” (1985) – offers a couple of innocuous snickers at best, but the overall film is truly mediocre and the cult following it seems to have attracted – to the point of spawning two unnecessary sequels (1994 and 1997) and a remake (2009) – is hardly deserved.
Understandably famous is the scene when demon-possessed scream queen Linnea Quigley plays “hide the lipstick” by inserting it into her nipple (!) for no apparent reason.
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Quotes
- A young brave got lost and settled here with his family by mistake. Anyway, they found him three weeks later sitting under a tepee he made out of his squaw's intestines and chewing on the leg of his papoose.
- I've heard stories about this place ever since I was a kid. The Hull family met a pretty gruesome end, didn't they?
- But we all experienced them... the noise, the stink, and the chill. They're all signs of demonic infestation.
- Would you listen to me? They're not ghosts! This house is not haunted, it's possessed!
Trivia
- According to the film’s resident expert in all things supernatural: “A haunted house is a house with ghosts in it, the spirits of people who’ve died. But the spirits living in a house possessed have never existed in human form. They’ve only existed in spirit form. They’re pure evil. They’re demons“.
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