Castor’s Hallow’s Eve Duds – Night of the Demon (1980)

Not to be confused with the pluralized Halloween-soiree movie, Night of the Demon is a cloddish, tactless 1980 “video nasty” on a shoestring budget about a series of mutilations via Sasquatch. All of the Pacific Northwest attacks are eyewitness accounts of Bigfoot unscrupulously dismembering and maiming campers within the region.

While the first evisceration is fairly tawdry (along with a crimson aperture point-of-view for Bigfoot’s vision), the shot of the blood streaming into a footprint is pretty dexterous. Most of the acting from the professor to the victims (with ample samplings of T&A during a van sex scene) is massively amateurish which uncommonly augments the low-fi charm of James C. Wasson’s production.

The eponymous creature himself is mostly a dropsical agent of chaos unlike the docudrama The Legend of Boggy Creek. Outside of a few brief money shots, Bigfoot’s visage and profile are discountenanced in the shadows. His design is basically a lanky man with the pelt of someone suffering from a wicked case of hypertrichosis.

Every time the beast materializes, he violently assaults the humans with untamed, slice-and-dice viciousness (ex. A sleeping bag gag was later the afflatus for Jason Voorhees’ bundled bludgeoning in Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood). The Doppler-effect keyboard score whenever Bigfoot is nearby sounds like the Casio electronica hardware is on the fritz. All of the flannel-attired students’ hypotheses about Yeti effigies and incestuous offspring are retroactive excuses for flashback padding.

Since the film wasn’t a sleeper hit at the box office and has remained an obscurity, most of the copies look like public domain bootlegs which wallow in the picture’s grainy, repellent seediness such as the lightning-glimmered rape scene between the 15-year-old Wanda and the unkempt, fleecy leviathan. In particular, the penis extraction scene (a motorcyclist’s manhood is lacerated from his body by Bigfoot in the bushes) and the prosthetic effects are worthlessly squalid Tom Savini imitations.

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