THE DEMON

THE DEMON

The Demon was created in a supernatural dimension where Halloween was actually filmed and produced in South Africa.  I can imagine the theatres were packed during its theatrical run and it subsequently inspired a slew of other South African slasher films.  It plays all the same cat and mouse, stalker-in-the-background games as Halloween and features a faceless killer that is described as an inhuman demon by his “Ahab” (Cameron Mitchell), but as it is from another dimension there are many key differences.  The demon wears gloves with razor tipped points but many times he chooses to choke his victims or body slam them rather than stabbing them.  I could only imagine that he chose to suffocate people rather than stab them to death because in this supernatural otherworld metal is really, really flimsy.  The claws must have been made out of the equivalent of aluminum, but I can’t really be sure.  Cameron Mitchell plays a psychic Sherlock Holmes (ironic if you know the Halloween series), but his tele-pathetic powers end up boiling down to smelling pillows and drawing shitty pictures and getting shot in the face.  There’s an odd subplot involving a budding courtship between two minor characters that might eat up too much screen time if you’re a picky sissy pants; I thought it paid off in adding a certain emotional weight to their subsequent deaths at the gnarled hands of the demon.  I was almost sad to see them go.

Scenes come from nowhere and pop and fizzle out of existence.  There’s a club named Boob’s Disco.  Gratuitous nudity and awkward, almost completely nonsensical cuts round the whole shebang out.  Written and directed by the immortal Percival Rubens, whom I’m sure is a big name in dimension-X, be sure to pop this bloke into a rusty old VCR on a rainy day if you want Halloween but tire of convention.