Night of the Demons 2

NIGHT OF THE DEMONS 2
(R, Republic Pictures, 96 mins., limited theatrical release date: May 13, 1994)

Do you remember the three signs of demonic possession as outlined in a certain 1980s horror cult film? No, they do not involve water, sunlight and late night foodie calls, I've moved on from Joe Dante films for the time being. No, I'm talking about infestation from beyond the grave, Satanism and the human body as medium for the morbidly deceased. There are three warning signs you need to know if you ever hope to escape a haunted house post haste.

The noise is the first one, preferably the loud shriek of a teenage girl startled by some apparitional premonition visible only to her eyes, the kind which provokes easy cynicism from the hormonal heathens of the world. Yeah, the shriek may be no cause for real alarm, but then there's the chill. As cold as the touch of the Reaper himself, the kind whose only security blanket is one procured for a dirt nap. But death is too late to make similes for, you realize, and thus you take a deep breath through your nose only to catch a whiff of Hell on earth. The foulest stench is in the air, the funk of 40,000 years, and grisly gh...

I'm sorry, I got a little carried away there. No mere mortal can resist a "Thriller" joke. It's human nature, I tell you.

The point is that the noise, the stink and the chill are things which occur in a precise order and constitute the danger of demonic possession. It's advice that the new batch of doomed youths in Night of the Demons 2 should have picked up on before they wind up in Hull House, the infamous slaughter mill where Angela Franklin and friends threw the Halloween party which ended them all.

And by them, of course, I mean it ended Angela and her friends. Or did it?!

Because Amelia Kinkade is back in black bridal garb as Angela and she wants to celebrate her inevitable return to the corporeal world. Sadly, none of her old friends want to come back in limbo, so Linnea Quigley is out of the picture. And the original's director, Kevin Tenney, is also not on the guest list. However, reprising their positions from the last film are writer Joe Augustyn, producer Walter Josten, cinematographer David Lewis, and special effects designer Steve Johnson, so it's not all that mercenary. And yet every party needs a proper planner, so who is the man to take charge of "Night of the Demons 2: Angela's Revenge," so to speak?

Enter Brian Trenchard-Smith, an Englishman who went on to corner the market for Ozploitation from the mid-1970s onward. Critical consensus dictated that Trenchard-Smith comes from the Land Down Under not just geographically, but also aesthetically, until Mark Hartley's giddy Not Quite Hollywood gave the filmmaker a ringing endorsement from Quentin Tarantino and sincere love for the likes of Stunt Rock and Dead End Drive-In, which I also recommend. The 1990s saw him transition into American B-cinema, specifically the straight-to-video sequel mill which led him to Night of the Demons 2 as well as Leprechaun 3 & 4.

Yes, he was the man who brought you a demented dwarf from Ireland bursting out of a horny space traveler's kiwis a la Alien while quipping "Always wear protection."

There is plenty of phallic humor to go around in Night of the Demons 2, which owes as much to the Porky's school of horny hi-jinks as it does to its 1988 progenitor. The male heroes are introduced peeking through binoculars at the neighboring bedrooms of their lady co-eds, thus ensuring the film's Hard-R credentials. Flirtation involves a basketball which dribbles up towards a miniskirt with magnetic force. The baddest of the bad girls herein has heaving bosoms which allow for easy demonic access to attack the nearest lech. And once the horror kicks in, it's easy to go Freudian with the many snakes and tentacles which lash out in anger.

Caught in the middle of all the kinky chaos is Angela's biological sister, Melissa (Merle Kennedy), the designated Carrie White of St. Rita's Academy, a Catholic boarding school run by Father Rob (Rod McCary) and Sister Gloria (Jennifer Rhodes). Rob is a bit more liberal in his attitudes toward reformation than the strict Gloria, demanding that the students have more input into the upcoming Halloween social than Gloria prefers. Not only that, but Sister Gloria has a...well, habit of interfering with the throes of young lust by waving her trusty yardstick in between the students and commanding, "Save a little room for the Holy Ghost."

The campus alpha bitch Shirley (Zoe Trilling), though, defies Gloria by using her banishment from the dance to convince her girlfriends, including Melissa "Mouse" Franklin, to have their own party at infamous Hull House, the last known whereabouts of Angela. The poor orphaned cadet is made the brunt of a cruel stunt involving a virgin sacrifice, but the wicked spirit of Angela intervenes by hiding within a lipstick tube which fans of the original will know where it's been. The students make it back to St. Rita's, allowing Angela the freedom to come alive and wreak havoc among the student body.

Whereas the original Night of the Demons offered a scenario straight out of The Evil Dead, the sequel takes some of its cues from the gonzo school of splatter comedy in the vein of Peter Jackson where the more the messier. The demons in this film are treated more accordingly to the rules of vampire lore, easily dispatched with holy water and melting down into puddles of goop. In undeath, an athlete's severed head can be used as a basketball and Angela can transmogrify to adapt to any scenario, emerging even as a serpent. And there's a little Dead-Alive in Sister Gloria by making her kick ass for the Lord, although there's no explanation given for how she can overcome her own decapitation when she is not one of the demons. Are we supposed to accept her as an angel?

At least Jennifer Rhodes (of Slumber Party Massacre II and Heathers) has a field day with her performance, as do McCory's skeptical minister (a nod to Stir Crazy, perhaps?) and Bobby Jacoby (the prankster kid from Tremors) as freckle-faced demonology obsessive Perry, who makes a case for being the missing Frog Brother. On the opposite end, Cristi Harris gets the film's most warming character as Bibi, Mouse's lone teenage ally who manages to have premarital sex and survive, and there's Christine Taylor, the future Mrs. Ben Stiller, getting called "Marcia" by one of the jerky boys as the vapid Terri. Clearly, she was going places. Also in the cast are Darin Heames, the circumcision victim from Dr. Giggles, as giggling sadist Z-Boy and Johnny Moran & Ladd York as the nominal but not loathable Everydude heroes.

But as is always the case, the villain is the main reason to watch, and "Mimi" Kinkade gets to indulge both her Rue McClanahan lineage and dancing pedigree as the wicked Angela. Whether taunting a pair of missionaries with a cake party at the start of the film or doing a reprisal of her sultry "Stigmata Martyr" showcase later on, she makes a deliciously feminine counterpoint to the wannabe Freddy Kruegers of the horror world.

Your enjoyment of the film depends ultimately upon your nostalgic reserves for the adolescent T&A  comedies and/or the equally puerile Video Nasties from the 1980s. Brian Trenchard-Smith doesn't exactly come close to either Peter Jackson or Stuart Gordon in his disreputable hand, but he doesn't stand in the way of the cheap thrills and is all the more respectable for it. Maybe I should credit him less for the blatant use of stock footage from Tenney's film, but the film is far too much of a lark to be shocking. Night of the Demons 2 stakes its own claim as a good-time bad movie which might not stand up to repeat viewings, but it walks tall and swings a mean rosary. I'll take it over any of the Leprechaun movies.

Witchboard

WITCHBOARD
(R, Cinema Group, 98 mins., theatrical release date: December 31, 1986)

Kevin S. Tenney has quite the propensity for possession, what with his two initial cult hits, both franchise fodder, focused on disturbances in the spiritual realm casting dire palls on the material world. Maybe he must have felt tired of the slasher conventions from his collegiate beginning, although his most famous film, the sophomore effort Night of the Demons from 1988, has definite influences from its early 1980s body count brethren. Tenney's debut Witchboard, however, doesn't wait too long to get to the conjuring even as its dials down on the carnage, certainly an intriguing comparison point given the E.C. Comics-friendly madness of his next project.

Like Sam Raimi before him, Tenney had a fairly kitchen sink drama sensibility which gradually was renovated into a blood fountain. Witchboard is distinctly character-oriented for undemanding shock cinema, its male leads being estranged best friends who harbor an ever-festering resentment based on their love for one woman. It's a soap opera for gorehounds, where confrontations and consolations coexist with bodies thrashing against walls, demonic POV tracking shots and the occasional ax murder. But mostly it's driven by a string of séances dependent on that reliable of slumber party excursions into the supernatural, the Ouija board.

Yuppie vineyard heir Brandon Sinclair (Stephen Nichols) has been using it routinely to speak to the ghost of ten-year-old David Simpson. At a party hosted by former flame Linda Brewster (Tawny Kitaen), Brandon invites her to make contact with David as her newest beau, working class prodigy Jim Morar (Todd Allen), stews in drunken jealousy. Snarky Jim agitates David so much, the specter deflates the new tires on Brandon's Cobra convertible. Linda takes it upon herself to communicate with David solo for a peaceful resolution, but she develops a fixation with the Ouija which puts her at risk when her naivety allows the apparition to wreak violent, vengeful havoc on Linda, Jim, Brandon, and their friends.

The result is strictly run-of-the-mill as far as possession stories go, with "accidental" deaths, pregnancy scares, nightie nightmares (shrouded in mist, of course), and the mercenary services of a medium, in this case a wisecracking, rainbow-haired space case named Zarabeth (Kathleen Wilhoite) who uses adjectives like "gnarly" and quotes Tigger for that extra shot of forced whimsy. Also as insufferably eccentric is the town's single detective, Lt. Dewhurst (Burke Byrnes), who suspects Jim as the suspect based on solely his missing hatchet from his construction job. Every one of Dewhurst's shakedowns involves his manchild preoccupation with magic tricks, so much so that he's juggling oranges at one point apropos of nothing. That he doesn't arrive for the demonic showdown dressed like Bozo the Clown and wielding an oversized mallet is as baffling as it is merciful.

Tenney employs these touches to lighten the mood, undoubtedly, but they don't gel at all with the embittered melodramatics between Jim and Brandon. The movie hinges on repairing the camaraderie between these absentee ex-friends, who come across as catty right from the start only to eventually reconcile in a motel room, where they learn to laugh again. Oddly enough, atheistic Brandon is the movie's expository mouthpiece while loutish but loving Jim bears the so-called redemption arc which works about as well as you'd expect. Some viewers may actually be cheering for him to pull the trigger on himself in the climax.

But what about 1980s vixen/human hood ornament Tawny Kitaen? Between the poles of Tom Hanks and David Coverdale, the B-actress is touted in the vintage on-set interviews included with this special edition release as playing more than just a reactive piece of eye candy. In a word: HA!!! Linda Brewster is far from Final Girl material, as she needs to be rescued by not one but TWO love interests, bears the brunt of the film's many otherworldly torments and is even rendered vulnerable in that old standby, The Shower Scene. At no point does she ever come across as in control of her own destiny, nor does she effectively will out her inner demon at the end like even Mark Patton's Jesse Walsh did in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2. There isn't even an attempt to de-glamorize Tawny as she is invaded by the movie's ethereal bogey, the final stages only serving to make her look like a model on a photo shoot than anywhere else in the film.

To be fair, Tenney proves himself a workable horror craftsman at times even at this early stage in the game, and puts a lot of thought and effort into not only the framing, camera shots and cinematography, here handled by Roy Wagner, but his screenplay. Tenney's wit can be generous, as is his attention to character development, and the film does unfold as an engrossing enough mystery, at least until a ridiculous anti-climax/coda evokes an unwelcome "WTF?" reaction. Even though he leans too heavily on jump scares (a particularly annoying habit for Jim) and telegraphed close-ups of dangerous objects (Chekhov's sundial!), Tenney does hit some nerve-tingling strides involving one victim's sudden demise (think Final Destination) or a typically Raimi-esque chase sequence.

His touch with the actors, however, is particularly amateurish, especially compared to his deployment of the surprisingly large ensemble in Night of the Demons. If Tawny Kitaen fails to come across as convincingly possessed, then watch daytime soap star Stephen "Patch" Nichols and comic relief Kathleen Wilhoite try (and fail) their best to channel the spirits of James Spader and Annie Potts, respectively. The only performer with the decency to underact, the top-listed Todd Allen, could be seen as a grungy Andrew McCarthy, in that he is a pleasant enough non-presence, although Tawny is no Molly and, thankfully, there's not a Duckie in the gallery.

Because Witchboard is often released on home video in tandem with Night of the Demons, an audience has grown to such a degree that some have championed Tenney's debut film as superior. I don't buy that at all. Witchboard can only come across as a nervous cackle compared to Demons' disemboweling belly laugh. The dirtier system proved the better conduit for Tenney to let loose his puckish spirits, whereas if you used the disc of Witchboard as a planchette, you might end up as lucky as Morrissey did in his own song about Ouija boards: "P-U-S-H-O-F-F." Indeed.

Scream Factory, though, get a "P-A-S-S" for the deluxe high-def treatment they afford Witchboard. The movie looks like it's been preserved in that unmistakably 1985 amber and while the audio is of rougher quality, it's miles better than VHS. But it's the extras, of course, where the company outdo themselves. The Anchor Bay commentary track with Tenney and the film's producers remains enlightening and lively, about as perfect a rundown of the production as one could hope for, but is complemented by an equally cheerful new session with Tenney and a trio of the film's stars. Of course, you will want to see the video retrospective Progressive Entrapment to catch the still-adorable Tawny Kitaen giggly crushing on her male leads, but stay for more anecdotes involving O.J. Simpson and Parker Brothers. A B-roll bouillabaisse collects nearly two solid hours worth of candid on-set footage including more interviews, outtakes, effects tests, and a treasure chest of goofiness. All these plus he theatrical trailer, TV spots and a pair of still galleries to ensure you won't be able to spell right for a week. T-R-U-F-E.