Cody celebrates Halloween with demons, monsters, and cannibals.
NIGHT OF THE DEMONS 2 (1994)
Years have passed since the events of the original, 1988 classic Night of the Demons, but the legend of what happened on the nightmarish Halloween night it depicted endures among the teens who live in the town where it occurred. Where the demon-possessed former funeral home Hull House still stands on the outskirts.
Tellings of the legend are especially popular among the students at a Catholic school for troubled youths. The girls who attend the school shut off the lights in their dorm room, gather in a circle and tell the story by candlelight. A story of teens possessed, mutilated, dismembered, body parts scattered around Hull House. The body of every victim was recovered from the property except for that of Angela, the girl who made the unwise choice to throw a Halloween party in Hull House. According to the legend, Angela descended into Hell, body and soul, where she became the favorite demon of Satan himself. Now she is said to still roam the halls of Hull House, ready to terrorize and murder anyone who dares to enter.
The fact that Angela's younger sister Melissa, nicknamed Mouse because of her small size and meek manner, is one of the school's students makes her peers even more intrigued about the legend. Gossip among her classmates is that Mouse ended up there because her parents committed suicide a year after Angela disappeared when they received a disgusting homemade Halloween card from their missing daughter.
After bad girl Shirley gets banned from the school's Halloween dance, she decides to make her own holiday fun by stealing the Necronomicon from a demonology-obsessed boy named Perry and sneaking out to Hull House with a group of fellow students, a couple local hoods, and Mouse, who is tricked into joining them and totally freaks out when she sees where the others have taken her.
Shirley's plan is to scare her pals by putting on a fake sacrificial ritual, but that's not even necessary to stir up the evil spirits that lurk inside the crumbling mansion.
As soon as things start to get strange and scary, after Shirley's prank is thwarted, Mouse thinks she spots Angela, and a girl named Terri is scared by a talking head in a toilet bowl (which disappears when she tries to show someone else), the teens get out of there and head back to their school... And, unlike the group who preceded them in the previous movie, they're successfully able to make it off the property. But that doesn't mean the spirits of Hull House are done with them.
When Shirley is possessed in the grossest way possible by a tendril that slithers out of a tube of lipstick found in Hull House (a callback to one of the most popular moments in the original film), Angela shows up to bring some hell to the Catholic school.
In another callback to the '88 film, Angela makes her presence at the school known by crashing the Halloween dance to perform her own dance routine, while her demonic protégé Shirley does a provocative dance of her own... Which ends with her undergoing a monstrous transformation. That really kills the party atmosphere.
Demonic possession spreads through more characters, sisters are reunited, and it all builds up to a rescue mission raid of Hull House with a priest, the school's discipline-dealing, ruler fu-practicing nun Sister Gloria (called Sister Gory by the students), and Holy Water-filled water guns and balloons in tow.
Demon bodies do not take well to Holy Water.
While Night of the Demons writer Joe Augustyn returned to write the sequel's screenplay as well, that film's director, Kevin S. Tenney, did not return. Instead, directing duties on part 2 were handled by prolific exploitation and genre filmmaker Brian Trenchard-Smith, who did a lot of work in Australia and is probably best known in the states for this film, Leprechaun 3, and Leprechaun 4: In Space.
As a big fan of the first movie, I've always found the sequel to be kind of disappointing. Although it has a good cast and solid ideas at its core, the way its executed just doesn't appeal to me and doesn't live up to what came before.
A lot of my issues start with the script. I feel like there's too much time spent messing around at the school, and too much going back and forth between places in the structure - from the school to Hull House to the school to Hull House. Just land on a location and let's get this show on the road already. Because of this, the film doesn't fully deliver on the mayhem that I expect to see going into it until very late in the running time, and even then I find the action it does contain to be rather lackluster.
Other issues for me are the look of the film, which is flat and bland compared to the Halloween spookshow Tenney crafted with the first movie, and its overly silly tone.
The fact that Night of the Demons 2 is going in a goofy direction and isn't going to be as stylish as the first is clear with the opening scene, which shows Angela hacking up a missionary couple that knocks on Hull House's front door. It has humor that doesn't amuse me and no style or atmosphere to it at all. It's a bad omen for what's to come... And while nothing in the rest of the film is as poor as that opening scene, I still never find it to rise above mediocre.
And don't even get me started on how much the character of Z-Boy annoys me, both when he's alive and when he's a demon.
Night of the Demons 2 has a large fan base that is very adoring and appreciative of it, but I've always thought it was a bit of a letdown. I still watch it, though, for the little bit of enjoyment that its demons and the returning Angela do provide.
WITCHTRAP (1989)
To the public, Avery Lauder was known as a psychic and illusionist. In his private life, he was in fact an intensely evil man, a powerful warlock and Satan worshipper who sought immortality. To the police, he was the prime suspect in the case of the serial killer known as the Vineyard Slasher. When the police showed up at Lauder's cemetery-side gothic mansion, they found that their suspect was already dead, lying on the Satanic altar in the mansion's attic with his heart cut out and missing.
Lauder willed his mansion to his nephew Devon, who had no interest in living in it due to its proximity to the cemetery. However, due to stipulations in his uncle's will, Devon was unable to sell the mansion or tear it down, so he attempted to rent it out... Unfortunately, the place is haunted by the ghost of Avery Lauder, so no one has ever been able to tolerate staying in it for more than three nights. The ghost always drives them away with its ungodly shrieks and moans. Devon was beginning to feel like the place was a total loss, until he heard of a hotel that was doing good business precisely because it was, or claimed to be, haunted. He realized he could profit off of Lauder House by turning it into a bed and breakfast, people would pay for the opportunity to get scared by his uncle's ghost.
Devon had the mansion renovated at great expense, and hired Las Vegas magician The Amazing Azimov to be its first guest, pre-grand opening. During his stay, Azimov was so scared by the evil spirit that inhabits the mansion that he leaped to his death from a second story window to escape it. This event delays the opening of the bed and breakfast, but Devon has invested too much money into it to just let go of the idea. He has to make this business work. But to do so, he's going to have to have his uncle's spirit exorcised from the mansion.
A team is assembled: Paranormal researcher Agnes Goldberg. Her husband Felix, a mental medium. Whitney O'Shea, physical medium. Ginger Kowolski, video tech. At Devon's insistence, the group of experts in the supernatural are accompanied to the mansion by a trio of professional security operatives; Leon Jackson, Tony Vincenti, and their boss Murphy.
Vincenti is extremely reluctant to take the job, as he doesn't believe any of this ghost business and thinks the paranormal research team is made up of a bunch of chuckleheads, but Murphy talks him into doing it by threatening to fire him if he doesn't.
Vincenti is said to have been a wunderkind of sorts back when he was a rookie on the LAPD, but by the time he's working security he seems to have lost a step, because he doesn't remember that Avery Lauder was suspected of being the Vineyard Slasher until everyone is already getting settled in at the mansion.
Also at the mansion is property caretaker Elvin, who used to be Lauder's assistant in his stage show. Now, some may question whether or not Elvin knew of his boss's murderous activities and assisted him in those as well, but the group is quick to just let that possibility slide straight through their minds and move on, leaving Elvin to creepily lurk around the place, spy on people... and before very long, attack them.
Elvin isn't the only thing attacking people around this place. Previous guests might have simply been scared off in three nights or less, but the powerful, evil spirit of Avery Lauder seems to be building up toward some sort of terrible goal, as he has moved on from simply making noise to actually manipulating objects to kill people. The research team and their bodyguards haven't even been in the mansion for one day before they start getting picked off one-by-one. Impaled through the throat with a shower head. Crushed by a car with no driver. The ghost's most impressive feat? Hurling a bullet through a character's head.
Throughout the day, the highly agitated and afraid Whitney tries to talk Vincenti into accepting that there's something more going on here than the group being stalked by a flesh and blood madman, but it takes a lot to convince the atheistic, smart-aleck former cop. He comes around eventually, though. Soon there's no denying that the spirit of Avery Lauder is on a rampage. And he wants to be reincarnated.
Written and directed by Kevin S. Tenney, director of Night of the Demons (1988) and writer/director of Witchboard , Witchtrap was apparently a project that came together quite quickly. The distributor offered Tenney financing to make another horror movie, so he wrote the screenplay in one week and rushed into production. The quickness with which it was made, and the low budget the distributor was offering, is quite obvious in the finished film. Witchtrap is a mess that shows little of the style, care, or promise Tenney had displayed with his previous two movies. The cinematography is for the most part bland and lifeless, the sound is horrible, and a lot of the acting is laughably bad, as is the dialogue the actors had to deliver.
Tenney knows Witchtrap didn't turn out very well and I've never seen him talk about it much. What he has addressed is how the film was marketed.
Tenney's titles for the film were either The Haunted or The Presence. Witchtrap was the distributor's choice, part of taking the popularity of Tenney's Witchboard and running with it. "From the writer & director of Witchboard" was proudly displayed on publicity materials, the center of which was the face of actor J.P. Luebsen, who plays Avery Lauder but also played the villain of Witchboard. They were so blatantly seeking to cash in on the production's links to Witchboard that, so they wouldn't get in trouble with Witchboard's distributor, they put a disclaimer at the head of film notifying viewers "This motion picture is not a sequel to Witchboard." Of course, by the time viewers were seeing that, they had already rented the VHS.
I was one of those video store visitors who rented Witchtrap back in the day, and at the time when I first saw it, probably around the age of five or six but already a big fan of horror, I have to admit... I thought it was awesome. A ghost throwing knives and axes at people and getting a bullet through someone's head was cool stuff in my book, I enjoyed the presence of scream queen Linnea Quigley (as Ginger), and I was highly entertained by James W. Quinn as Tony Vincenti.
I only saw Witchtrap that one time nearly twenty-five years ago, but I always remembered it fondly. I was excited to revisit it now, but was let down by its quality issues. Still, James W. Quinn came out of it looking quite well. He had roles in both of Tenney's other movies; in Witchboard he played one of the lead character's best friends and is so likeable in his brief moments that the audience still feels the loss of him when he meets his demise at just the 21 minute mark, and in Night of the Demons he had a cameo as a convenience store worker, but his biggest contribution was doing voices for the demonically possessed characters. With Witchtrap, he finally got the lead for himself, and his Tony Vincenti is a great wisecracking hero.
Despite finding the movie to be quite bad and poorly made, I do get some enjoyment out of it, and a lot of that is due to Quinn/Vincenti. Because of the whole Witchboard cash-in aspect, it is a notable curiosity in the Tenney filmography.
THE CELLAR (1989)
Kevin S. Tenney's The Cellar was not supposed to be a Kevin S. Tenney movie. In fact, the director didn't even come on board the project until filming was already underway.
Written by John Woodward and Darryl Wimberley from a story by David Henry Keller M.D., the movie was also meant to be a directorial effort for Woodward and went into production with him behind the camera. But after eight days of shooting, the film had already fallen several days behind schedule, so the producers felt the need to replace Woodward. Kevin S. Tenney got the call.
Feeling experimental, wanting to see how well he could handle the situation, Tenney agreed to take the job. Needing to keep the production on schedule for the rest of the duration, the producers contacted Tenney on a Friday, the same day Woodward was removed from the director's seat, officially hired him over the weekend, and Tenney was on set and behind the camera in time to start filming Monday's scenes.
At its foundation, The Cellar is a horror movie that deals with a fear many kids can relate to. It's a story about the monster that lives in the basement. However, the writers decided to explain their monster in the basement with an overly complicated backstory that stretches back to a different century, when the Comanche tribe deemed a section of desert to be forbidden, cursed land. They were able to keep the evil of the land at bay by sticking a spear in the ground and hanging a charm on it... But time passed, "the white man" ventured too far into this forbidden land, the spear and charm were disturbed, and now the evil has been unleashed.
That evil, represented by a beast that was created to destroy the Comanche tribe's enemies, a magical hybrid of multiple different types of animals that secretes a corrosive substance, emerges from a cave which opens into the cellar of a home that a family - Mance Cashen, his new wife Emily, their baby April, and Mance's young son from a previous relationship, Willy - has just moved into.
As strange things start occurring around the Cashen household, locals hype up the danger of the creature with recitations of the legend and stories of past encounters with it, and Willy even has direct confrontations with the hideous monster... Then he goes on with his normal daily life. If I knew for certain as a kid that a giant monster lived in my basement and had been face-to-face with it, I definitely would not handle it as well as Willy does. Nor would I be brave enough to head down into the cellar with a flamethrower like he does.
Although Willy is at the center of the horror activity, since it's kids who fear having monsters in their basement, so a kid would have to be the main character in a movie about one, the family is warned that baby April is the one in the gravest danger. And this family still doesn't hit the road.
Mance's mental state declines, people start dying, and the Cashen family must step up and take it upon themselves to remove this evil from the world once and for all.
The finished film doesn't show any ill effects from the mid-production director switch... The elements that make it a mediocre movie are primarily script issues. The way characters handle situations, Willy knowing too much too soon, and a sprinkling of ridiculousness. The production falling behind schedule could explain why the climactic sequence feels so rushed, though.
However it turned out, Tenney can't really be blamed, even though it's his name on the film as director, since he didn't make any of the choices when the movie was being put together. He was just handed a script and told to shoot what was on the page in the amount of time that had already been decided upon. The result was a movie that looks fine and cut together coherently, and although Tenney wasn't able to elevate the material simply by his presence, his experiment should still be counted as a success.
Some interesting casting choices were made before Tenney took the job. In a rare lead role, character actor Patrick Kilpatrick plays Mance Cashen. Kilpatrick tends to play psychopaths and thugs, it's very strange to see him as a family man, but he pulls it off. It helps that Mance becomes a nutty jerk over the course of the film. Lou Perryman of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 also appears in the movie as Mance's ill-fated boss, and Perryman is always a joy to see.
If you're into '80s horror, The Cellar is a creature feature worth checking out, just don't expect very much from it.
WRONG TURN 2: DEAD END (2007)
When Fox Home Entertainment started developing a direct-to-video sequel to the 2003 backwoods slasher movie Wrong Turn, there were a few different stories considered. Fox was keen on the idea of making the lead characters a group of women on a white water rafting excursion. Screenwriters Turi Meyer and Al Septien, DTV sequel veterans with the second Leprechaun and third Candyman movies under their belts, came in with three pitches: one would have picked up right after the ending of the first movie and had the cannibalistic mountain men taking on the police, another would have had a military presence in the killers' stomping grounds, and the third, the set-up which I find to be the least appealing by far, was the winner - the cannibals start picking off contestants of a reality show that's being shot in their woods.
The show being filmed deep in the forests of West Virginia's Greenbrier Backcountry is the pilot for Ultimate Survivalist: Apocalypse, the brainchild of retired Marine Dale Murphy. A group of contestants who have chosen to do the show for a variety of different reasons are thrust into a simulation of a post-apocalyptic world, where they'll have to find a way to live off the land and complete tasks to keep from being eliminated.
Unfortunately for them, there's a cannibalistic clan of inbred mutants dwelling in these woods, and the contestants (and the production crew) begin getting picked off one-by-one, their corpses destined to become dinner.
The killers in the first movie were a trio of mountain men called One-Eye, Saw-Tooth, and Three Finger. Only Three Finger returned for the sequel, but he's joined by more members of his family this time around; siblings of his who are known simply as Ma and Pa, and their offspring (who are working on making offspring of their own) Brother and Sister. Three Finger has also fathered a baby called Splooge with Ma.
Although the original idea was that the deformed appearance of the killers and their resistance to pain was just the result of generations of inbreeding, the sequel adds another element to further explain what's going on with these people. When the Hope Creek paper mill was abandoned in the '70s, dangerous chemical waste was left behind, contaminating the area. Wildlife died off, ran off, or became mutated, and locals fled for their own safety. Only one family stayed behind... and we see how they turned out.
Mixing a slasher with a reality show set-up could have gone as badly as the mixture of inbreeding and chemical waste, but thankfully, Meyer and Septien were able to write a script that is actually a solid slasher despite the game show aspect, and the concept wasn't used to make it in the found footage style. There are shots from the perspective of the reality show's cameras, but not too many.
Instead of something annoying and overwhelming, the reality show is really just an excuse to get people into the woods so they can be knocked off. As it should be.
The characters are well written, with a lot of them having more depth than you might expect from this type of movie. Their likability is further enhanced by the great cast that was assembled, which includes Blair Witch 2/Texas Chainsaw Massacre '03's Erica Leerhsen, Final Destination 3's Texas Battle and Crystal Lowe, Henry Rollins, and Aleksa Palladino. There is a fantastic twist on expectations with Palladino's character.
Among the cannibals is Freddy vs. Jason's Jason Voorhees Ken Kirzinger, who plays Pa.
The only returning cast member from the first Wrong Turn is Canadian character actor Wayne Robson as the Pepto Bismol-swilling Old Timer. I really didn't like what was done with Robson's character here, but at least he has a great scene that ends in spectacular fashion.
A large part of why Wrong Turn 2 works as well as it does is the coup Fox pulled off with the hiring of director Joe Lynch to make it his feature debut. Lynch is a major horror fan, was clearly gleeful to be getting a chance to not only direct a movie but better yet an old school style slasher, and he went all-out in an attempt to make something that would live up to the '80s horror he grew up on.
As soon as I saw the movie begin with the title appearing in font reminiscent of Evil Dead II and then open with "Electric Avenue" by Eddy Grant playing on the soundtrack, I knew I was in good hands. There was someone at the helm who was obviously as into the '80s as I am, and I could just sit back and enjoy the gory mayhem.
Wrong Turn 2: Dead End is a whole lot better than you would expect it to be. Lynch, Meyer, and Septien took a concept that was highly questionable and turned it into a movie that is totally worth watching.
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