Original Cinemaniac

Sasquatch Splatter: Night of the Demon

            One should growl at the moon to cheer the glorious release of a 2-disc Blu-ray of one of the rarest Sasquatch splatter films from 1980- Night of the Demon. Severin has lovingly restored this practically unseen film from the answer print with over 5 hours of loony extras and jaw-dropping interviews.

            Years ago, a close friend showed me a scene from a muddy-looking VHS of Night of the Demon, where a motorcyclist stops at the side of the road to take a piss and a monster suddenly tears off his penis. “What the hell is this???” I asked, and he told me it was a loony, gory Bigfoot movie. For years I hunted through used bins in video stores across the country for this elusive VHS but never found it. (The director’s name is even misspelled on the back of the box).

            Cut to 2022 and out it comes on Blu-ray looking absolutely pristine and if I was worried that I would be disappointed after all these years of rabid searching, I shouldn’t have been. It’s a deranged wonder of a film, and after watching the extras I found that it was even more unexpectedly outrageous than I imagined.  

            Right from the first scene where a male camper has his arm ripped off by an unseen beast and the blood fills in the creature’s footprint in the dirt, you know you’re going to love this demented disc. The plot is about a college anthropology professor (Michael Cutt) who gathers some students to head to a forest are where several people have mysteriously been murdered by a supposed strange creature that roams the woods.

            They load their equipment in a boat and head to Carlson’s Landing in search of a weird mute woman who lives in a remote cabin in the wilds named Wanda (Melanie Graham) who may be the key to the mystery. 

            They ply Wanda with candy, hypnotize her to discover the origin of her trauma and she reveals her father was a psychotic Bible-thumping tyrant who kicked her out of the house for an imagined indiscretion and stood by and watched as she was sexually ravaged by a hairy huge beast from the forest. This resulted in the birth of a deformed baby which died, and after her father’s death in a mysterious fire she has never uttered another word.

             When the professor and students decide to dig up the baby’s body to study it Bigfoot bursts from the forest in a fury and goes on a bloody rampage.

            That’s the gist of the plot, but what makes this movie so memorable is the wild explosions of gore and violence interspersed throughout the film. And come to find out director James C. Wasson never shot those scenes at all and was flabbergasted to find that the movie made the “Video Nasty” list in England and was banned for decades.

            Wasson began as a back-up singer who worked on TV’s Glen Campbell Music Show for many years. Afterwards he became the manager of Bobbie Gentry (Ode to Billy Joe). But the lure of filmmaking was always in his blood and he cut his teeth making gay X-rated films like Dreamer (1975), Windows (1984) and What the Big Boys Eat (1985) under the name Jim West or J. Clinton West

            There is an extraordinary moment during the Blu-ray interview with him when the director is asked about these gay adult films and he looks shocked and asks, “how do you know about that?” But producer Jim L. Ball came to him in 1980 with a horror script about bigfoot and asked him to direct. Wasson describes the casting process and actually location shooting (up in the California forests) a positive, fun experience, and contrary to the usual bad acting in low budget films, the cast does a decent job (considering the director was warned that he was only allowed one take for every scene). But afterwards a screening had audiences laughing their heads off and Wasson was confused by the reaction and assumed the movie was never going to be released. Producer Jim (“Buddy”) Ball went back and shot all these Herschell Gordon Lewis-like gore scenes (“which cost nothing,” he said) and interjected them throughout the film which is why anyone remembers this movie fondly today.

             A guy in a sleeping bag is flung around by the monster and impaled on a tree branch; a camper has his arm torn off; a couple making love in a van are bloodily interrupted; two girl scouts (who look in their late 20s) get stabbed to death, and the finale is so gory and out-of-control it makes you insane.

            The scene with the biker was done with a gay porn actor who went by the name Rob Stevens (he was the only one they could find that had no problem showing his penis before the creature yanks it off). 

            Director James C. Wasson walked into a video store one day and stumbled on a VHS of it and had no idea the movie even survived. And in England it was rounded up by authorities as part of the official crackdown on violent videos. On the 2nd Blu-ray disc are features like Cryptid Currancy: Transgressive Aggression in Bigfoot Cinema by an expert on the subject of Sasquatch films (and there are surprisingly quite a few)- David Coleman. And one with co-author of Cryptid CinemaStephen R. Bissette who goes over the many different cinematic takes on bigfoot and why Night of the Demon stands out in so many whacked-out ways. 

            I could never call this movie “good” in any traditional way. It’s kind of wonderfully inept and often laughable. But the preposterous gore sequences add a layer of inspired lunacy to it that makes it unimaginably enjoyable and, trust me, you’ll be pulling this bonkers Bigfoot movie off the shelf to show scenes to friends for years to come.