ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT, SEPT. 8, 1989
By Steve Newton
The newspaper ads for Night of the Demons show a vampiric female demon holding a party invitation, and the caption reads: “Angela is having a party. Jason and Freddy are too scared to come… But you’ll have a hell of a time.”
Well, I don’t know about that. There is a party in the film, but I doubt whether Jason and Freddy would have been worried about crashing it. They probably knew it would be a bore and decided to stay home and play crib.
This flick’s biggest claim to anything approaching fame is that it stars current B-movie scream queen Linnea Quigley, who came onto the “jiggle horror” scene in 1984 with a leading role in the hilarious and gross Return of the Living Dead, but has lately been showing up in such video dreck as Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers and Creepozoids.
In Night of the Demons she plays Suzanne, one of a handful of mostly obnoxious teens that attend a Halloween party at an abandoned funeral parlor. Not surprisingly, the place is possessed, and one by one the stereotypical kids (the rowdy punk, the young tough, the good girl, etc.) fall victim to severe demonization.
For those cineastes out there who appreciate sex and violence, the former is provided by Ms. Quigley, and there is the odd interesting gore effect from FX man Steve Johnson (An American Werewolf in London, Fright Night). But it’s hardly worth seven bucks to see Quigley, in the flick’s wildest scene, thrust a lipstick into her own breast.