NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1981)

Movies about Bigfoot usually stink. Most of them fall on the side of a classroom mental hygiene film, with non-actors flailing about in mock terror over some poor unfortunate soul in a modified gorilla costume. The Curse of Bigfoot (1976), in particular squanders its running time on a group of stupid crackers on an archaeological dig before the tatty Sasquatch shows up. There are a few notable exceptions, however … Shriek of the Mutilated (1975) found the notorious Roberta and Michael Findley turning their twisted attention to the abominable snowman myth with a subplot involving an international cannibal cult, as well as some low-grade murder scenes (toasters dropped into bathtubs, etc.).

Head and shoulders above all other Bigfoot features is Night of the Demon (1981), which has a great deal of notoriety over a single scene. In flashback, a scrawny biker in a black leather jacket pulls off to the side of a lonely mountain road for a smoke break and a piss. A furry arm reaches out of the bushes, grabs the biker’s bulging bishop and tears it clean off. The moaning victim stumbles back to his motorcycle, the tattered remains of his manhood dangling out of his jeans, as his molasses-thick blood trickles over his engine.

As shocking and as unprecedented as this one scene is, there are still more sights and sounds in Night of the Demon to keep the most demanding sensation-seeking viewer awake and happy. Just as ballsy (and far more ridiculous) is yet another flashback involving two Girl Scouts. The two teenyboppers, with the Girl Scout corporate logos prominently displayed on their T-shirts are seen walking through the woods armed with hunting knives when Bigfoot grabs the two of them, and slaps them together, forcing the other girl to stab the other to death in a hail of phony stage blood. The least attentive viewer will ask, "Why don’t those kids just drop their hunting knives?" It makes for an arresting visual regardless.

Most horror films are little more than a parade of unusual scenes that have little to do with a cohesive narrative anyway, and Night of the Demon has far more than its quota. The Bigfoot in this film is not the put-upon androgynous wooly man of the woods, but a sexually aroused, sexually aware and sexually active man of action.

Take an early scene (still another flashback) where the Bigfoot spies on a fornicating couple in a van. The woman is a big-haired bimbo with perky breasts, her male partner a lustful troglodyte. The voyeuristic monster throws back the van’s doors, drags the man outside and then flings his bloody carcass on the windshield. The woman, in one of many countless bad performances screams feebly before apparently dying from fright, the camera zooming in on her eyeball in the manner of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Another copulating couple in a sleeping bag has their tryst interrupted when the horny Bigfoot rakes his claws against the man’s back.

This is just a handful of one of many scenes that make Night of the Demon such a keeper. The plot? Uh, Professor Nugent, a suave college professor whose friends and colleagues say is "just a sucker on the subject of Bigfoot (actual quote)" leads five of his friends on a mountain expedition to find the shambling man monster. To prove his point, he shows his class a home movie of a mother and child waving at the camera, where the unseen photographer is trounced upon and a hairy arm brushes across the screen as the camera runs out of film, long before The Blair Witch Project (1999).

The investigators uncover a story about an isolated hillbilly woman named "Crazy Wanda" who is rumored to have had connubial relations with the monster that led to the birth of a monster child, or in the words of a spinsterish old biddy, "Deformed. You know, mongoloid," Along the way, the intrepid party happens upon a sex ritual in the woods performed by the local yokels in front of a "huge anthropoid effigy."

The expedition meets with much misfortune along the way, with one of their party eventually being carted off into woods by the monster for God knows what. But the audience won’t care, as they’re an unsympathetic lot. When asked by one mountain man to be left alone, the undeterred academics pitch tents on his lawn and camp out until he agrees to talk. When they finally meet up with Crazy Wanda in her mountain shack, they barge in and unlock the door to her private shrine without asking. Talk about rude! And as members of an accredited university, they don’t appear to be highly intelligent as well. In their initial search for Wanda, one of them merely yells "Waaaaaaaaaaaan-da!" into the cavernous forest.

There’s a ton of unintentional laughs to be had along the way, but things get dire when the professors finally encounter Wanda. It seems that Wanda was the product of an abusive, religious zealot father who forbade her any contact with boys. The acting, directing and photography, barely competent before now finds a newfound clarity and the film suddenly becomes almost too good. You know the rare instances in a horror film where it stops being an entertainment and begins to touch on some raw nerves that the audience doesn’t want to acknowledge? We’ve all come to laugh at a stupid monster movie, and we’re suddenly being presented with child abuse, religious oppression, rape and more than just a little soupcon of incest …. Like that. This episode could have easily flowed from the pen of H. P. Lovecraft.

Night of the Demon does have a palpable "Heart of Darkness," surrounded by lots of cheap laughs, bad acting and terrible scripting. But no one can deny that these scenes involving Wanda’s past have an unmistakable power and weight to them. It all ends in pandemonium, with the monster bursting into the cabin as the principal characters all wait to be killed in all manner of novel ways. Only Professor Nugent makes it back to civilization, his face "horribly mutilated," all of his stories discounted as the ravings of an unhinged academic. We’ve been entertained, we’ve laughed it up along the way, but Crazy Wanda -- and other people like her, who live right next door, remain out there.

Night of the Demon is a foremost example of why people such as myself return again and again to the realm of no-budget schlock horror. Expecting little, we sometimes get something much, much more than what we bargained for.