Carnography

WNUF Halloween Special (2013)

While Ghostwatch will always hold a place in my heart as the BBC drama that inadvertently terrified me and a generation and was at least partly responsible for kindling the fascination with found footage and mockumentary horrors and the way in which certain publicity methods and media, in general, can create a special type of buzz around films almost greater than the film itself, it's not the only film out there to utilise this format. Today we're taking a look at the WNUF Halloween Special, a "film" I'd been wanting to see since it first came out but which I only got around to seeing it last night.

It's October 31, 1987, and television channel WNUF is broadcasting their special Halloween programming. Among the safety tips for trick-or-treaters, a local dentist's "Cash for Candy" scheme and a segment on a Christian group who believe that the holiday is evil and that all those who participate in it will come to an unpleasant end, the highlight of the night is a live broadcast from the Webber House, a local property that has stood empty since the brutal murders of Mr and Mrs Webber by their son 20 years previously. The son claimed that he had been driven to commit the murders by demonic spirits after using an Ouija board, and many people have claimed that the house is still haunted by those spirits. Reporter Frank Stewart plans to broadcast a live investigation into the house, with a Catholic priest and a psychic investigator couple and their "psychic" cat Shadow, and even hold a phone-in seance in the house on live TV. Almost from the moment they enter the house, however, the psychics begin to feel that there is a threatening presence in the house and that they are in danger. Frank is flippant about the whole situation though and demands the investigation and broadcast continue, even after the investigators' equipment is smashed and Shadow goes missing. Clearly, someone or something is in the Webber House with Frank and the others; will this live broadcast prove the existence of ghosts, or will this all end badly for the crew?

As I said at the start, I've wanted to see the WNUF Halloween Special since it came out in 2013; I couldn't bring myself to watch it until last night, however, because the moment I learned there was a cat going into the house I had a terrible feeling about what that would mean for poor Shadow. To say whether I was right or wrong would constitute a spoiler though, and since the WNUF Halloween Special is best experienced knowing as little as possible going in, all I'll say is that I succeeded in watching it, and I'm glad I did - even if my heart was pounding with the horrible anticipation of potential cat death for parts of it.

The whole gimmick of the WNUF Halloween Special is that it's an old VHS recording of the live broadcast from 1987, complete with static, the occasional tracking error and even ad breaks and local TV ads (which reminds me, must go down to Phil's Carpet Warehouse). This serves to both give the film a massive dose of cinema verite authenticity, and also give a massive dose of nostalgia for anyone watching who grew up in the 1980s. Granted, some of this was lost on me because UK 80s TV was pretty different from US 80s TV, but I can still appreciate the effect the film was going for. I will say that the frequency of the ads did start to grate on me after a while, and the pacing did start to suffer as a result of them as the film progressed, especially with the way the film would "fast-forward" through the ads on several occasions. It did keep with the concept that this is an old VHS tape that we're watching and that we're just skipping through some of the "boring bits", but it was really a very fine line between immersion and boring that they trod with this idea.

The WNUF Halloween Special does succeed in creating the right kind of atmosphere though. You really could believe that this was broadcast in the 1980s, on a small local channel, and that people just stumbled on it that Halloween night in 1987, not realising what they were tuning into and remaining transfixed as the events unfolded. You can see that it learned its craft from some of the greats (although your mileage may vary) of the past - The Last Broadcast, The Poughkeepsie Tapes, The Blair Witch Project and possibly even Ghostwatch itself, from framing to the potentially unreliable narrator (because hey, this could still be just one big hoax, right?)

The atmosphere in which you watch the WNUF Halloween Special is also key to how much you enjoy it, I think. I was lucky enough to watch it as part of a group, where we kept up the conceit that the events we were watching really happened, at least in part for the people (like me) who hadn't seen it before. Of course, we knew it was all fiction, but it was fun for those 82 minutes to really suspend disbelief and get properly into it. I certainly think I wouldn't have had the same enjoyable experience if I'd watched it on my own in a drier, more analytical setting, so take that as you will. But if you're like me and enjoy things like Ghostwatch and Local58, then you should definitely give the WNUF Halloween Special a watch.

 

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Amityville: The Evil Escapes (1989)

After the cinematic dead fish that was Amityville 3-D, the Amityville franchise was left alone for a few years. But as we've seen too many times, there's always someone who can't leave a rightfully-dead series well enough alone, and so Amityville: The Evil Escapes (sometimes seen with an optional 4) was released as a TV movie.

On a dark and stormy night (again, and really?) a small posse of priests turn up at 112 Ocean Avenue to perform a mass exorcism. On the face of it, everything seems to have gone well, but unbeknownst to all but one young priest the evil in the house has just jumped ship into a lamp, which then gets sold at a yard sale and shipped to a family in California. Once it arrives, it doesn't take the evil lamp long to make itself at home - soon it's putting parrots in toaster ovens, turning the garbage disposal unit on just as a hunky boy is sticking his hand down it, and making the youngest daughter of the family think that the lamp is actually her recently-dead father. Will Father Kibbler, the priest who saw the evil enter the lamp during the exorcism, be able to get to this new family and save them from the lamp before it's too late?

So. Evil lamp. Well, this franchise ran out of ideas fast, didn't it? The film's credits claim that Amityville: The Evil Escapes was based on the book of the same name, but none of the short stories in that book were actually used for this movie's story. Ah well. The movie barely has a handle on the series' continuity, after all (how is the house even standing and fully furnished after the massive fireball that erupted from it at the end of the last movie?), so should we really be surprised that it doesn't know where its plot comes from?

To be fair though, the lamp does look suitably creepy - like the killer from The Snowman went and crucified an ent. It's creepy enough on its own, in fact, that the addition of the demonic eyes and nostrils that periodically appear in the "head" globe actually makes it look absurd and somehow less scary. So it's safe to say that the SFX are about on par for your average late-80s TV movie - which is to say they're not very good (although they still look better than Amityville 3-D).

Perhaps because it was a made-for-TV movie, Amityville: The Evil Escapes manages to be both faster-paced and also utterly tame at the same time. Not counting the time it took for the lamp to travel from the East Coast to the West Coast, the majority of the movie's events take place over three or four days, which has to be a new record for this series... yet the lamp can only manage to kill four people (that's including the parrot), amputate a hand and stab someone in the shoulder. Perhaps it was just feeling jetlagged after its cross-country trip, or maybe we just didn't see all the delivery people it massacred along the way.

The movie's high point is a strange one as well. It involves a 50something female housekeeper having an impromptu duel with a teenage boy who is accidentally wielding a possessed chainsaw. And this isn't even a climactic scene in the film; instead it happens at about the halfway point of the film and appears to have been added solely to insert some mild tension between the matriarch of the family and her daughter and grandchildren (because of course, she's going to blame the boy for playing with the chainsaw). It's all a bit of a disappointment, really.

Today's review is a little shorter than usual because, really, there's very little that can be said about Amityville: The Evil Escapes. It's bland: not the worst film in the series but far from the best either. Very little happens in it that's worth remarking on unless you count the fact that the film manages to forget that there's a dead body under the house by the time it ends - I'd like to see them explain that to the police when it's eventually discovered. It's as though even the film was so bored with things that it forgot what had happened, which is never a good sign for a film...

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It (1990)

Since I so recently reviewed the new version, I should really be efficient and do the 1990 TV version now. So here we are with the "original" movie version of Stephen King's IT; the one that launched a generation's coultrophobia (although personally it was the bleeding photograph that did it for me).

Derry, Maine; 1990. Children in the town are disappearing, and what's worse only some of them are being found; or rather, only parts of them are being found. The town librarian, Mike Hanlon, knows what is going on but cannot get the police chief to believe him. Instead, he calls his six childhood friends - all now highly successful adults living across the USA and even in Britain - and reminds them of a promise they all made as children. Back in 1960 the seven of them faced down the shape-changing, child-killing monster that was preying on their town and defeated It, and then they all made a promise together that, if It ever returned to Derry, they would also return and finish the job that they started. But will they even have the strength as adults to repeat what they did as children - especially when they can barely remember what happened back in 1960?

This version of IT was of course the first to come out (not counting the book, of course) and so there has been a lot of talk and debate over whether this version or the 2017 version is the better/scarier option. Personally I think this is an unfair comparison as so many of us grew up with the terror of the 1990 version, but looking back on it now requires some nostalgia goggles. After all, what scared you as a child in film, TV or otherwise is unlikely to still scare you as an adult. Yes, IT scared me when I was a pre-teen, but so did Zelda from Terrahawks, the Kandy Man from Doctor Who and The Nothing from The NeverEnding Story (although to be fair, that last one might still scare me. Existential nilhilism...)

No, the biggest reason the 1990 version of IT is still held in such high regard by so many is because of one person: Tim Curry.

Tim Curry had the role of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and to say his role was a memorable one would be something of an understatement - why all those clowns didn't step up to defend the good name of clowns in 1990 is a mystery, especially when Curry's version of Pennywise has (until now, perhaps) been the iconic "evil clown" for 27 years now. Remember, this is the same Tim Curry who lost out on voicing the Joker on Batman: The Animated Series because his laugh was just too creepy for a kids' cartoon.

Of course, Tim Curry wasn't carrying the whole two-part TV movie on his back solo. The late Jonathan Brandis as young Bill Denborough, Seth Green as young Richie Tozier, and the late John Ritter as the adult Ben Hanscom - among others - all gave stellar performances, but somehow whenever this version of IT gets talked about it's nearly always about Pennywise and/or Tim Curry's performance.

Much like in the book version, there's a hint of Cthulhu or otherwise otherworldly entities in this version of IT, with the revelation of IT's true form and the concept of the "deadlights" as something that, if you look directly into/at them, they drive you completely insane. Of course, the deadlights have also been brought up in the 2017 version, but as that only deals with the events as children we're yet to see how things pan out there, while the 1990 version has everything contained within the two parts of the TV mini-series.

This 1990 version of IT, as I said, was originally made for TV in two parts that were later put together to make one three-hour movie, and it's here that the movie does fall down when you look at it critically. Stephen King's IT is a long book, and so trying to fit it all into three hours (plus ad breaks) is just not going to work. And they didn't even try to fit the whole book in - yet it still feels awkwardly paced - rushed in some places and too slow in others. That's the risk of the TV movie, of course. Looking back at it now, it's also incredibly dated, but that's not really a fair judgement to make on it considering it's cultural impact at the time. It was more than good enough for us in the early 1990s.

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Without Warning (1994)

I like symmetry. It might be an OCD thing, but I don't care. So when I was randomly watching videos on YouTube the other day and came across a copy of a TV movie I saw in the mid to late-90s, that just so happened to share the same name as the film I most recently reviewed here, I pretty much knew I was going to be reviewing it as well. So welcome to the 1994 made-for-TV movie, Without Warning, which is a completely different film from the 1980 film Without Warning. (Don't worry, it won't get too confusing.)

A TV broadcast of a thriller on October 30, Without Warning, is interrupted by a special bulletin. Three earthquakes registering 8.5 on the Richter Scale have been reported in three different places on the planet more or less simultaneously. These earthquakes are quickly revealed to have been caused by three meteor strikes, all happening in rural, supposedly unpopulated areas, although two survivors are quickly found - an 8-year-old girl at the impact site in Wyoming, and a French skier at the site in Lourdes, France. Both are badly injured and babbling incoherently. The third site in a remote area of China, is too difficult to reach to check for survivors. The news broadcast stays with this story as things continue to unfold - scientists from NASA and SETI are brought in for secret consultations and a strange hum begins to emanate from the impact sites which disrupts air traffic communications and some broadcast signals. Then comes the news from the White House that a fourth asteroid is on an impact course at the North Pole. Air Force planes armed with low-yield nuclear missiles are launched to try to destroy this asteroid before it impacts and causes a potentially extinction-level event, but even as this is happening some are questioning and pointing out the bizarrely perfect geometry of these meteor strikes, which to them can only mean there is an intelligence behind them. As the clock counts down, the news broadcast and everyone watching around the world waits to see if they will survive this, and whether it is just a natural phenomenon or some sort of extraterrestrial contact...

Without Warning is a mockumentary-style TV movie that was inspired by the infamous 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast play by Orson Welles. There's even a couple of nods to that broadcast in the date that this is taking place on and in the mention of a place called "Grover's Mill" near to the impact site in Wyoming (Grover's Mill New Jersey was where the first alien cylinder landed in the radio play). Perhaps ironically, it also caused some of the same panic when it was first broadcast, as even though it had both text and a voice-over at the start of each segment telling people it was an act of fiction, people were still distressed enough about it to complain. One of the main reasons they believed it was real was because of the presence of veteran news anchor Sandor Vanocur, who played himself - a similar reaction to the one the viewers of BBC One's Ghostwatch, who believed it was legitimate because of the appearance of household names like Michael Parkinson and Sarah Greene. As a result, CNN issued an order that its reporters and news anchors were not allowed to play themselves or any other role in a fictional movie, and as far as I am aware, the film has never been shown again on American TV, although it is now available on DVD (and YouTube).

The film follows a remarkably tight narrative structure, as it gradually reveals more and more information as the events unfold. It even contains a moment of Chekov's Voyager recording which they wait until practically the last minute to reveal. Paying attention while watching, however, reveals that rather than being a real-time mockumentary, the movie actually condenses several hours of news footage into 88 minutes - the better to keep the narrative flow moving without showing long periods where nothing is happening, as would probably have happened if this was a real news event. The final quarter of the film is perhaps a little too aggressively preachy with its message - yes, humanity's tendency to react to most unexplained events with violence is probably going to come around and bite us on the ass eventually - but at the same time it's still a valid moral.

Don't try to follow the science too closely in Without Warning, however. It's one thing to accept that an advanced intelligence would maybe direct meteors and asteroids at the Earth's surface with pinpoint accuracy, but once nuclear weapons get involved then things get rather more erratic. At one point near the film's climax, the light from an incoming asteroid (reported to be two miles wide) is visible on the news camera filming the event, and the news reporter even throws himself backwards fearing an impact before the nuclear missiles obliterate it. At that low of an altitude, you're going to nuke the city as well as the asteroid, not to mention the fact that there is no debris whatsoever from the obliterated asteroid. But I probably shouldn't be getting too frustrated with inaccuracies like these when it's the message of the film that's the important part.

One of the executive producers of Without Warning was David L Wolper, who had been in TV since the 1960s and had produced several other mockumentary-style films through the decades, including The Hellstrom Chronicle and The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. Clearly the man had an eye for dystopian mockumentary scenarios. And Without Warning is quite bleak, at least at the end when the whole situation is revealed and we realise how badly things have been messed up. As I said, it's very tightly paced and narrated, and keeps the audience's attention throughout with its slow feeding of plot points to keep us on edge. The fact that it was originally a TV movie means that a lot of people have probably missed seeing it, which is a shame as it's considerably better than some Hollywood movies released before and after.

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Ghostwatch (1992)

Today's review is of something that is, very technically, not a movie, but a feature-length TV drama. However, it's considered (at least today, 24 years after its one-and-only broadcast) to be one of the first horror mockumentaries, and an influence on other cultural zeitgeists such as The Blair Witch Project. Furthermore, on a more personal note, it had a great effect on me - from my initial terror as a 13-year-old girl watching part of it and thinking it was real (as did a lot of the country), to being one of the events that really got me interested in things like this - found footage and mockumentaries and how they're presented and marketed to make them seem genuine, and how the viewing public's reactions feed further into this, making them seem all the more real. Welcome... to Ghostwatch.

It's Halloween, and the BBC have planned a special live broadcast for the night - a live investigation of what is said to be one of the most haunted houses in Britain. Well-known TV personalities Sarah Greene, Craig Charles, Mike Smith and - manning the studio - Michael Parkinson are all hosting this investigation into the supernatural, along with experts in both the paranormal and skeptics to offer opposing views. The house in question is a normal-looking semi-detached house in a London suburb that's become host to a whole bevy of poltergeist activity, a lot of it focusing on the two young daughters in the house, Suzanne and Kimmy. The ghost is known as "Pipes", because at the beginning of the haunting their mother had tried to explain away the noises as just the pipes banging. As the live broadcast continues, viewers to the show ring in with various stories about previous tenants of the house, from an 19th century baby farmer to a disturbed transvestite who hanged himself in the house and wasn't found for some time, during which his dozens of cats ate part of his face, and the supernatural activity increases to a disturbing degree. Too late the show hosts realise that what they have done is create a nationwide seance, giving Pipes the power to enter every home to wreck havoc...

Ghostwatch was never meant to be thought of as "real". It was a Screen One production, had a cast list listed in the Radio Times, and when the show began it had a "Written By" credit at the very start. But a lot of people tuned in late, myself included, and so missed the signs that this was fictional. So when the mammaries started pointing upwards and the feces impacted with the fan, an awful lot of us freaked the fuck out, convinced that we were seeing something real. To make matters worse, a lot of people turned off before the end so that they didn't see the credits at the end (on Monday morning, the one girl in my class who had seen it through to the end was considered something of a hero, and had to give plot recaps for most of the day). Effectively, this was the British version of the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast - there weren't quite riots reported in the streets, but there were a lot of complaints, and Ghostwatch was blamed for the death of at least one person by suicide and listed as a cause of post-traumatic stress disorder in children (speaking for myself, I couldn't sleep for three days after seeing it and to this day I find it difficult to watch it at night or alone, and this is despite knowing exactly how it was made and all the behind the camera tricks). It was banned from ever being shown on TV for a decade, and even though it has since been released on DVD it has never been shown on British TV since.

One of the reasons (I think, at least) that Ghostwatch ended up being so creepily successful was the way in which it hid "Pipes" in shots throughout the programme - not quite subliminal imagery but certainly enough to make you do a few double-takes. They even play with this idea at the very beginning, with a clip in which the viewers can all see a shadowy figure slowly appear standing in the girls' bedroom - but when the footage is played back, the figure doesn't appear, making us question if we're actually seeing ghosts or if its just our imaginations running wild. The sound of the ghostly cats who accompany Pipes as he gains power is also incredibly unnerving, and the fact that all the faces involved in this were well-known British TV personalities (Sarah Green in particular was a children's TV presenter at the time) make the audience feel much closer to them and more likely to believe in what's happening to them.

Today, of course, Ghostwatch is very dated, and the sheer fact that it was touted as a live broadcast in 1992 means that it's simply not going to capture the same belief that it did back then. It was also based on the infamous Enfield Poltergeist case of the 1970s, and because of films like The Conjuring 2 people are much more likely to see through it and recognise the story behind it than we were back in 1992. As a product of its time, though, it was both brilliand and scary as hell, and a huge influence on the mockumentary horror genre as we know it today.

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Halloween III: Season of the Witch

After the climax of Halloween II had Michael Myers thoroughly immolated, thus putting a severe crimp in any more sequel plans for him (for the moment), John Carpenter and Universal decided to go with the direction that Carpenter had originally envisioned when he first thought up the Halloween franchise - an all-new standalone movie whose sole connection to the previous films was that it was set on Halloween. And so in 1982 we were given Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a movie that, while not thought of too highly when it was first released, has achieved something of a cult status in the 30-plus years since.

After a man is brought into hospital, raving about someone coming to kill everyone and feverishly clutching a Halloween mask in his hands, and is then killed by a strange man who then immolates himself in his car, doctor Daniel Challis decides to investigate the events with the help of the dead man's daughter Ellie. Together they end up in the town of Santa Mira, which is home to the Silver Shamrock factory. Silver Shamrock is run by Conal Cochran, and they make the most popular Halloween masks in the United States - they even have a daily countdown jingle on all the TV channels, and a planned "event" on Halloween itself. Santa Mira is a strange town indeed, with a 6pm curfew and a large number of strange, silent besuited men working all around the factory. As he investigates deeper, Daniel discovers the terrible truth about the Silver Shamrock factory and the masks they produce - they're all part of a Druidic plot to return to the old ways when Halloween meant sacrifices to appease the Old Gods. The masks have all been equipped with a special microchip (fitted with a stone chip from a stolen Stonehenge slab) and when the Silver Shamrock programme is aired, it triggers what can only be described as technomagic to make deadly insects and snakes materialize inside the masks and kill everyone. Oh, and the workers in the factory are all androids. Daniel must find a way to stop Cochran from completing his ritual plan, and save the nation's children from a nasty death...

When I can reference a Spinal Tap song when talking about a movie and it doesn't make things any more surreal is when you know that a film might be a little bit round the bend. I don't know where to begin - the ancient Druid plot to kill children with microchips, the microchips fitted with magical stone chips from Stonehenge, or the magical appearing killer snakes and insects in the same movie that has the antagonist relying on androids and computers (to be fair, technomagic is perfectly acceptable on its own, but Conal Cochran would seem to me to be much more of an old school magic guy, which just makes things even more confusing).

Part of the reason for this virtual pot-pourri of plot complications is because of that reliable old chestnut, studio interference. In this case, John Carpenter had originally gotten none other than the great Nigel Kneale of Quatermass and the Pit fame to write the script. Kneale had written a script that relied a lot more on psychological horror and paid homage to Invasion of the Body Snatchers among others, but when Dino De Laurentiis saw it he didn't think it was good enough and so ordered more violence and gore added. As a result, Kneale demanded his name be removed from the movie.

To be fair, most of the nailed-on gore scenes are actually quite good. We rarely see the actual acts of violence, just the aftermath. Special mention has to go to one unfortunate woman who pokes at one of the magic microchips with a hairpin and gets her face blown open like a seed pod. But most of the deaths we see are of the androids, and they bleed orange juice.

Halloween III did not fare well at the box office. Sure, it made a profit on its $2.5 million budget, but its main failing was that people had gone into it expecting another chapter of the Michael Myers saga, and therefore come out disappointed. It might have been a seen as a good, if deeply quirky, film if it hadn't been attached to the Halloween brand, and certainly that's how it's become viewed decades later with the wisdom of hindsight (and an appreciation for deeply strange films), but at the time that and its general bizarreness counted against it. In fact, to be fair it's still going to confuse a lot of people today, with its druids and shipping of 5-ton Stonehenge slabs across the Atlantic without anyone noticing. But now at least we can see it as a cult film and give it more of the recognition it deserves.

 

Demons 2 (1986)

There are several types of sequel. There's the continuation of events, where you follow the original cast into new adventures. There's the ramping up of events, which takes the original scenario and makes it bigger/more deadly/adds another puppy to the mix. There's the conclusion, which is generally supposed to be the ending of a series (until some studio executive with a hankering for another suck on the cash cow remembers it). In the case of Demons 2, the film falls into more or less the same category as Evil Dead 2 - both a sequel and kind of a remake at the same time. Yes, it's a little confusing.

This time, we're in a tower block instead of a renovated cinema, but there's still quite a few characters from the first film hanging around if you look carefully - the Sylvester Stallone-alike punk is now the security guard, for example, and Tony the Pimp is now Hank the Gym Leader. One of the residents of the tower block, Sally Day, is having her 16th birthday party, but she and several others in the block seem to be more interested in watching a "docudrama" about the threat of the Demons (thus suggesting that the events of the first movie actually happened, and that this movie is set some time after that, when people have somehow sealed off the Demon-infested areas and then gone on with their lives). Things go all pear-shaped, however, when a demon escapes from Sally's TV set into the real world to possess her. She then goes on to attack and transform her party guests, who then go rampaging through the tower block, and... well, you get the picture. Our heroes for the rest of the film are Hannah and George, a heavily-pregnant couple of (apparently) Physics students who have to fight to escape the apartment block and the pack of demons roaming the halls and stairways.

Right, let's get this out of the way first. Remember the deus ex machina of the first film? Well, Demons 2 doesn't go quite as far, but we do still have to check our disbelief at the door when a heavily-pregnant woman in labour climbs onto her boyfriend's back and they absail down the glass-fronted side of a building. Yeah, I know I shouldn't pick at moments like this, especially in a B-movie horror involving demons who can come out of TV sets, but stuff like this just bothers me, okay? There's B-movie absurdity, and there's movie-breaking absurdity, and one of these can totally destroy a movie's flow.

As for the rest of the film... well, it's mostly like the first movie - demons attack people, people transform into demons, repeat as necessary with appropriate amounts of gore. Tony the Pimp/Hank the Gym Leader gets a much bigger role in this movie, organising the survivors into a group to try to fight off the demons and having more success than he did in the first movie (admittedly that's not too hard, all things considered), and there are plenty of gory, splattery kills to go around (including one gym rat who pays the ultimate price for wanting to do just one more set of reps). Demons 2 also takes a brave step in having both a dog and a small child get transformed into demons, rather than having them be rescued by our heroes so they can walk off into the sunrise at the end - in the case of the latter demon, however, they then decided to have a second demon emerge from the child's body like the unholy lovechild of a Gremlin and a Chestburster. Honestly, you probably could have made a child's toy of the resulting demon and sold it alongside Boglins and no-one would have batted an eye.

And that sort of thinking is probably where Demons 2 falters. It remembers all the cool stuff it had in the first movie, and tries to bring all of that back, only better, in the sequel... but misses the mark and ends up more baffling than anything else. There's even a subplot that goes through half the film about four punk teens driving to the party, much like the Sylvester Stallone-alike and his friends... except the subplot is a complete dead end this time, making you suspect it was only put in there so we could listen to some more 80s New Wave/Punk (hey, I'm not complaining). In the end, Demons 2 is a good enough film... but it doesn't live up to the manic carnage of its predecessor, which is a shame.