Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight

TALES FROM THE CRYPT PRESENTS: DEMON KNIGHT
(R, Universal Pictures, 92 mins., theatrical release date: January 13, 1995)

Interior: a bloodied bedroom at night. The camera glides across the scene of the carnage as a buxom blonde in black lingerie phones her illicit lover, Jack, to break the good news. The woman has just planted an axe in the chest of her wealthy husband, Carl, and is writhing passionately on the bed, orgasmic in her description of the dirty deed. As Carl is soaking in a vat of acid down in the basement, the murderess draws a hot, soapy bath, unaware that she is in an E.C. Comic version of reality where the dead don't lie still for very long. Placing a hot towel over her eyes, she cannot see Carl's grisly corpse is approaching with an axe of his own to grind.

Unfortunately, the only cut is off-screen, as it is yelled by the director of this tawdry tale, none other than your old pal, The Crypt-Keeper (reliably voiced by John Kassir). He is not too pleased with the "hack-ting" of guest star John Larroquette as zombie Carl, tossing off a couple more puns in anger before calling for a reset. That this moment occurs after we've seen the familiar opening credits sequence of the HBO series Tales from the Crypt, replete with downstairs tour and Danny Elfman's jaunty theme music, seems to tell us we're not getting the same old slash-and-jive familiar from the TV scream.

Nope, the Crypt-Keeper's gone Hollywood, and is taking his show to the sinner-plex. Okay, I'll stop, which is coincidentally what happened to the Tales from the Crypt Presents banner after just two widely-released movies.

The 1980s was the decade of the horror anthology revival, which went full throttle both theatrically and on television. Not only was there a Twilight Zone: The Movie released by Warner Bros., but there was a New Twilight Zone developed for CBS. Warner also distributed 1982's Creepshow, the George A. Romero/Stephen King collaboration which kicked off the trend, with its own unofficial, syndicated spin-off in Tales from the Darkside, which was also made into a movie. However, by the time it was released in 1990, its popularity was eclipsed by Tales from the Crypt, which came from the same pay-TV channel who brought you The Hitchhiker and was produced by the some of the biggest wigs in the biz: Richard Donner, Walter Hill, Joel Silver, and Robert Zemeckis.

The series premiered in June 1989 with three back-to-back episodes which boasted these blockbuster directors (excluding Silver) offering their own personal spins on William Gaines' controversially lurid EC Comics. The series would go on to court fellow superstars like Michael J. Fox and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who would each direct their own episodes, and revolving door talent in front of and behind the camera helped keep the show fresh on a weekly basis. In short, Tales from the Crypt established a successful blend of irony and scatology, reveling in cheap thrills and cunning comeuppances for several years.

However, the inaugural Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight was not an adaptation of a previous story from the Gaines library. It was written as early as 1987, and was initially offered to filmmakers Tom Holland and Mary Lambert, both of whom were drawn to ill-fated projects like Fatal Beauty and Pet Sematary Two. Before it even made it to Joel Silver, it was passed along to schlock horror impresario Charles Band and his Full Moon Features label. Demon Knight was meant to be the second of the mythical Crypt movie trilogy, with Donner, Hill and Zemeckis developing their own separate entities. Universal Studios, who initially green-lighted all three planned projects, ordered this as their first.

Things didn't quite work out that way, as Donner's "Dead Easy" and Hill's "Body Count" never came to fruition. The former was name-dropped as a post-credits stinger, essentially becoming the working title of what would be Bordello of Blood, a box-office stiff. As the seventh and final season emigrated to Great Britain, Tales from the Crypt was clearly on its way out. The final episode adapted The Three Little Pigs, itself originated in English literature, as a decidedly Mad Magazine-style cartoon which was even more puerile than Green Jellö.

Although the opening tracking shot evokes Zemeckis' early "And All Through the House," the maker of Forrest Gump doesn't fully influence the final project in the manner of, say, Mr. Spielberg. The director of Demon Knight is Ernest Dickerson, a famed cinematographer known for the early Spike Lee "joints" from She's Gotta Have It to Malcolm X. Dickerson made his feature debut with the ghetto drama Juice (1992), which starred Tupac Shakur as an unstable, Cagney-worshipping thug named Bishop(!) who homicidally threatens to derail his friend's promise as a star DJ. After that, it became clear that Dickerson's directorial career was less informed by Do the Right Thing and more by the less incendiary, genre-friendly yeoman's work of Def by Temptation.

This is the Ernest Dickerson of Surviving the Game and Bones, refashioning familiar B-movie scenarios into much livelier if no less disposable entertainment than any handful of low-budget/direct-to-video hacks. The plot as it stands is a straightforwardly apocalyptic knock-off of Night of the Living Dead, pitting good vs. evil and placing a disparate bunch of stereotypical bystanders under siege from the supernatural.

The mysterious adversaries at its center kick off Demon Knight with a car chase as our eventual hero Brayker (William Sadler) fervently unloads a shotgun at his tracker, a demon prince known only as The Collector (Billy Zane). Both vehicles explode into fiery wreckages, but Brayker crawls toward a head start into the next town, Wormwood, New Mexico, where he unsuccessfully tries to steal a truck parked outside a diner. Escaping authorities, who are tied up with the crash and The Collector's damage-proof survival, Brayker runs into the friendly neighborhood lech, Uncle Willy (Dick Miller), who takes him to safe haven at The Mission, where all that's missing is a welcome bell.

Also among the denizens of this Villa of the Damned are sassy proprietor Irene (C.C.H. Pounder); loveless prostitute Cordelia (Brenda Bakke) and her regular client Roach (Thomas Haden Church); a disgraced postal clerk named Wally (Charles Fleischer); and work-released housekeeper Jeryline (Jada Pinkett Smith), who will reveal herself as a purer soul than her equally hard-boiled hosts, most of whom turn stool pigeon on a dime. For instance, since Wormwood's such a small world, Irene intuits that her latest customer is the car thief Roach mentions and calls Sheriff Tupper (John Schuck) and Deputy Bob (Gary Farmer) on the scene, with The Collector in tow.

Just what is it that this chrome-domed, cock-of-the-walk Occultist covets? It's a combination key and vial filled with holy blood that in the right hands can be used as a weapon against evil, and the worst case scenario being that it could be used with six other keys for the same evil to take over the world. The Collector is foiled in his acquisition, and one memorably sick decapitation later, he conjures an army of green-eyed Pumpkinheads to lay waste to his human enemies. As Brayker spills his magical plasma to barricade the windows and doors, The Collector dutifully possesses the weak souls of his captives, and in turn spills their blood as punishment.

Whereas Night of the Living Dead had a palpable sense of friction and social awareness, Demon Knight condescends to juvenile degrees even Tom Savini resisted in his straight 1990 remake. It wouldn't be a Tales from the Crypt movie without a moment in which one character's temptation is lifted straight out of a beer commercial, where the girls are topless and the booze bottomless (but not the other way 'round...this is R-rated, after all). In the film's most refined moment of black comedy, Irene gets her arm ripped off by a crazed Cordelia and is later offered it back on a silver platter by The Collector, to whom she lifts up her stump as a means of flipping the bird. There's even a lost boy thrown into the mix, Danny (Ryan O'Donohue), the same tot who scared Brayker away from the diner, who reads a poisoned issue of Tales from the Crypt which takes him over, the subsequent chaos mirrored in the panels of the book.

Dickerson keeps the slime and splatter flowing in a rather futile attempt to cover up the utter senselessness of the scenario. There is a puzzling moment where one of Brayker's force fields is shotgun-blasted out of commission by the noxious Roach, thus allowing the demons easy passage. Whilst Roach will later betray the rest of the survivors by scrubbing off the blood which bars the demons, that violation of safety at least seems credible. But if a gun can shatter the blockade like it were plate glass, you'd presume The Collector could help himself to the weapons in the cop car and get at his victims a lot easier. Not that there is a rationale for how The Collector does manage to return to inside the motel; he just shows up without even a dramatic entrance.

Equally flimsy are the limitations imposed on the good guy, Brayker. There are seven stars burned into the palm of his hand, each meant to represent someone he is forced to guard, and if all seven die, Brayker apparently loses. If he runs out of good blood, he loses without even them taking the precious Key ("They bring back the darkness...just like that"). Forced into explanation, he screams, "God damn it! I'm not making these rules up!" Nope, he didn't, but three flailing screenwriters certainly did, and they generalize Genesis to such a degree that the name "Jesus" is never once intoned even with obvious crucifixion flashbacks. And if Brayker is supposed to protect these seven flakes, maybe the joint suicide bombing of Irene and Bob which happens later is a huge mistake.

On a purely pulpy level, though, Demon Knight has plenty going for it. Billy Zane imbues sinister charm and glee into the role of The Collector, owing more to Beetlejuice than Freddy Krueger as he taunts his foes ("You're not worth the flesh you're printed on!") and croons disingenuous come-ons to first Cordelia and then Jeryline. Jada Pinkett Smith proves her mettle as a feisty heroine, although her best moments are built-in to the film later on in typical Final Girl fashion. However, it's William Sadler's resolute, ravaged lone wolf which keeps the action credible and the stakes high. As adept here as his Niles Talbot was in Walter Hill's first season Crypt episode "The Man Who Was Death," Sadler conveys a universe of intensity and ferocity in both his gritty delivery and behind blue eyes.

The rest of the supporting cast perform duly to their strengths, with C.C.H. Pounder's brassy matron and Thomas Haden Church's yellow-bellied braggart the clear highlights. Dick Miller is a delight to spot in dutiful "That Guy" fashion, but Dickerson never deigns to showcase him with as much invention as Joe Dante would allow, and Charles Fleischer's simpleton is the butt of a particularly lame topical joke which posits him as yet another budding psychopath.

Although the demons themselves are impotent enemies, as a lot of the killing comes from possession-and-dismemberment routines straight out of The Evil Dead, Todd Masters and his FX team have a field day with their creations, all drippy flesh and eyes as brightly green as Herbert West's reagent formula. There is also a hasty if spectacular farewell to The Collector which is a practical tour de force.

Unlike Wishmaster, which stained too hard to live up to Fangorian standards with very little to show, Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight is a distinctly mediocre thrill but nevertheless spirited where it counts. Putting it in context of its televised antecedent, though, it's a shame that both this and Bordello of Blood were such warmed-over, secondhand premises for which to launch a theatrical franchise. Given that its producers were responsible for gems such as The Warriors, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Superman: The Movie, the lack of imagination on a conceptual level is frustrating. But this first attempt proved to be it's most satisfying, especially compared to its desperately campy follow-up.

To be continued, Creeps...

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.

The Prophecy (1995)

THE PROPHECY
(R, Dimension Films, 98 mins., theatrical release date: September 1, 1995)

Imagine John Milton writing a B-noir screenplay taking off apocalyptically from the Angelic War premise of Paradise Lost. Lo, you have just foretold the coming of The Prophecy, Highlander and Backdraft author Gregory Widen's 1995 feature debut produced for the mid-1990s Weinstein boutique label Dimension Films. The Prophecy seems to have been lost in the shuffle coming from the cash-cow indie company who also gave you countless DTV sequels to Children of the Corn and Hellraiser, but if you were there in the '90s, The Prophecy remains engrained in your memory banks even if only for one reason:

Before he caught the fever only more cowbell and Fatboy Slim could subside, Christopher Walken was drafted to play a modern-day incarnation of archangel Gabriel, a roguish castaway from God's graces who seeks a mutiny in Heaven (that's not a half-hearted reference, as Walken could plausibly resemble an aged, American ringer for Nick Cave). Looking suspiciously like a character from Mirimax's hottest non-horror property, Pulp Fiction (in which he, Amanda Plummer and a still-unkempt Eric Stoltz also appeared in), Gabriel doesn't do as much hovering as he does strutting through the landscape. With a magnified sense of smell as well as a sardonic nihilism to his decrees, Gabriel may be mortal (angels on Earth aren't exactly invincible) but is possessed of a jubilantly swollen Godhead. Also, when he plays his trumpet, best to keep at least 100 yards away from him to avoid the debris.

Walken's continual cachets to his cultism also managed to include The Prophecy, whose modest success at least allowed Dimension to bring him back for the film's initial, non-theatrical sequels. But does The Prophecy work without him? Well, sort of...

The Prophecy is as graven and sunken-eyed as its antagonist, hinging on the brutal loss of faith, the animosity towards the Almighty for man's ascension, the dark soul of a war criminal imprisoned within an Indian girl's body, and the appearance of Lucifer himself, played with equally dangerous zeal by a pre-Tolkien Viggo Mortensen. The central character isn't even a celestial being, but a fallen man named Thomas Daggett, played by another major indie film star of the time, Elias Koteas (Exotica, Crash). Daggett was once set to be ordained into priesthood until grim visions caused him to break down on the pulpit and drive him into working as a detective. But his doubts will be put to the test when a crime scene investigation turns up evidence of an anatomically-incorrect cadaver and an unabridged copy of St. John's Revelations.

The corpse in question is the angel Uziel (Jeff Cadiente), and he was murdered in self-defense by another not-quite-ancient figure, Simon (Eric Stoltz). Simon sets out to the economically-depressed town of Chimney Rock, Arizona, to guard the spirit of local hero/Korean War occultist Colonel Hawthorne, but transfers it into the body of orphaned Mary (Moriah "Shining Dove" Snyder) as a contingency plan. This doesn't prevent Gabriel from tracking Simon down and slaughtering his nemesis, finally leading Gabriel to terrorize Mary, Daggett and schoolteacher Katherine (Virginia Madsen) in pursuit of Hawthorne's soul, which he needs to ensure his victory in the second war on Heaven.

The rationale is that even though angels may carry savage weapons, they are still novices in the ways of wickedness compared to some of God's most beloved creation. And yet here is Christopher Walken, who as a Bond villain (Max Zorin from A View to a Kill) mowed down an entire swath of henchmen with sick glee as well as pushed Sean Penn to the brink of madness in the domestic crime drama At Close Range, needing to possess someone else's power. Even as a dejected seraphim, Walken is already a master in cool menace. He relishes every threat to tear apart little Mary like a human Cracker Jack box just to get his prize, and his many matter-of-fact taunts about his "talking monkey" enemies are believably bitter.

Gregory Widen could have stood to put some more soul into The Prophecy, which, while not completely humorless, is still weighed down by a portentous essence, circling the action regularly like buzzards might swarm the desert scenery. Elias Koteas and Eric Stoltz are not without charm, as anyone who can remember Some Kind of Wonderful can attest for sure, but they play the roles with a solemnity that is stoic to the point of wooden. It doesn't help Stoltz's case when he has to finally unload Hawthorne's soul into the virgin Mary, a moment which will leave many scraping their jaws off the carpet. Virginia Madsen brings earthly sex appeal and pluckiness to the undervalued role of Katherine, making for a less oppressive form of gravity. Also in the cast are Adam Goldberg and Amanda Plummer as Gabriel's homosapien slaves, suicide cases stuck in depressed limbo to carry out the angel's every destructive whim.

It should be noted that Widen's story, whilst a peculiar and perverted twist on religious iconography which often stares at its own navel for long stretches, is not completely stupid, just not fully convincing. There is black humor in Walken's every scene and a sense of integrity to Daggett's conflicted ideals. Furthermore, as a director, he makes great use of angelic sculptures, Native American scenery and the ever-reliable special effects team. Most major studio genre films are not known for being ambitious and imaginative, mostly because of dollar-chasing skepticism, but Widen gets his vision across in mostly unfettered terms.

The trouble is that without the canny casting of Christopher Walken or the charmingly nefarious Viggo Mortensen ("God is love. I don't love you"), you'd be hard-pressed to call The Prophecy particularly entertaining or involving. Widen doesn't quite find a satisfying middle ground between intellectual and inessential. Maybe it's for the better as this is not exactly a bad movie, and it fits snugly in the middle ground between Dimension's more rewarding Scream series and the shameless schlock of those endless Leprechaun flicks. The premise is also fresh enough to make those later Prophecy sequels, even the ones which resurrect Walken as Gabriel, seem more cynical and dopey in contrast.

The Prophecy, meanwhile, isn't as sacred as it takes itself to be, and it's a shame Walken's irreverence didn't bless the rest of the film. This could have sincerely been manna from Hell.