Bigfoot: HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS this ain't.
An anthropology professor leads an expedition of a handful of students into the backwoods of California, where they seek to prove the existence of Bigfoot and determine whether or not the legendary cryptid is responsible for the murder of an assortment of victims. The search reveals a community of hillbillies that worship the Sasquatch, with a clearly unstable woman as the focus of a Bigfoot-related sex ritual, and stories of dire incidents involving the beast being recounted in flashback. The expedition is stalked and killed by the monster, and the unstable woman's history with the creature is made plain. She was raped by Bigfoot when she was fifteen, a violation witnessed by her religious fanatic father (who stood by and did nothing), and her father is convinced that his daughter is evil. Bigfoot's sexual assault was meant to impregnate the girl as a means to perpetuate his species (he's apparently the last of his kind), and when she agonizingly gives birth, her father kills the baby. Now totally around the bend, the girl burns her father alive in the family's barn. Anyway, while trapped in the girl's cabin, the expedition is stalked and killed by the beast, with only the professor surviving the massacre. Upon telling his story to the authorities and mental health professionals (the events leading up to his hospitalization are told as a feature-length flashback), the professor is declared criminally insane. THE END.
NIGHT OF THE DEMON — not to be confused with other similarly-titled films — arrived at the start of the 1980's slasher movie boom, and the narrative is pretty much a backwoods-set slasher with a Sasquatch as the killer. It stars no one anybody's ever heard of, features overlong takes and bad editing, and is an exercise in padding and utter boredom. Other than some memorably shocking set pieces, the film's sole distinction is that it was one of the films cited on Britain's infamous "video nasties" roster in the 1980's and banned as a result. I had never heard of this film until recently, and I totally understand why. It's cheap-looking, features no scares or suspense, and even its ban-worthy gory and violent excesses are about on par with gore effects one would see at a junior high school's cheapjack annual haunted house.
The film's two standout moments showcase a motorcyclist pulling over for a roadside piss, only to have Bigfoot's hairy hand grab the biker's penis from out of a nearby bush and rip it off, thus leading the poor bastard to bleed out,
and the flashback of Bigfoot raping that girl in her front yard while her shotgun-wielding dad observes in disgusted horror.
A rare example of what's often implied in monster movies being made quite explicit.
NIGHT OF THE DEMON was an amateurish waste of my time and Amazon rental money, and I am actually angry that I saw it. It's not so-bad-it-s-good. It's just a soul-sucking piece of anti-entertainment that is best avoided.
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