DEMONWARP

Directed by Emmett Alston. United States. 1988.

On paper, DEMONWARP sounds like my subconscious wrote it. It has everything I adore. Bigfoot. Aliens. Zombies. Evil clergymen. Old people getting KO’ed by doors. People tripping over things. Men with Kurt Russell hair. Women in ugly sweaters. Boomboxes. Former Oscar winners slumming it up. Short shorts. Michelle Bauer’s titties. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of Earthly delights, wrapped up in a lovingly cheap 80s package. It feels like it was made just for little old me. Unfortunately, the people who made it for me just so happened to hate my guts.

DEMONWARP is a turgid turd of a film that refuses to be pinched off. It moves with the grace of a 500-pound ballerina with two bad ankles and an inner ear infection. It lumbers and lurches, speeding through its astoundingly wild opening act before becoming practically inert, only regaining some momentum during the final five minutes. And this isn’t a short film either. It runs a full 91 minutes, and you will feel every single one as it wanders lazily towards its meandering denouement.

An indeterminate time ago, something crashes to Earth. A wandering priest comes upon it in the middle of nowhere, proclaiming it to be “the second coming. The Lord come down to Earth.” I don’t remember the part in the Book of Revelation about Jesus crash-landing in middle America embedded inside a big ass rock, but whatever. We then flash forward to present-day 1988 to find Bill, a middle-aged man with mismatched socks, playing Trivial Pursuit with his daughter inside a cabin in the woods. Without any warning, Bigfoot kicks their door down, knocking poor Bill unconscious. Bigfoot beats the high holy shit out of Bill’s daughter before running off with her corpse. This is as good as this film is going to get, folks.

We flash forward yet again, this time to Jack and his friends traveling to that very same cabin for the weekend. Jack’s friends want to relax, drink some beer, and have a bit of fun, but Jack has other ideas. Unbeknownst to his friends, Jack plans on spending the weekend investigating a spate of strange disappearances that have plagued this stretch of wilderness. The locals call it Demon Woods, which was probably the original title of the film before someone said, “Hang on, I can think of something stupider than that.” See, Jack’s uncle was one of the people who had gone missing without a trace, and he’s dead set on finding him. He’s even brought a Jeep-load of surveillance gear with him. Because Jack is such a good guy, he waits until they’ve arrived at the cabin and settled in for the night before telling his friends that he’s brought them to a death trap.

Bill stops by with his hunting rifle to warn the youngsters that they’re allll doooooomed, but they pay him no mind. Tom, the motor-mouth sarcasm machine, and Fred, the goofball, are competing for the attention of the lovely Cindy, while Jack and his girlfriend Tara get down to business in the bedroom. Fred decides to play a prank on Cindy by standing outside the bathroom window with a monster mask on while she showers. Unfortunately for Fred, Bigfoot has no patience for such buffoonery and quickly incapacitates him, carrying him off into the night.

The lumbering Sasquatch comes roaring back a bit later, tearing up Jack’s car before breaking into the cabin, snapping Tom’s neck and making off with some of Jack’s audio equipment. Down one car and scared shitless, the remaining trio decides to walk to town. Meanwhile, Michelle Bauer and her friend arrive at the woods, Coors in hand, for some topless sunbathing. We also follow some random guy out hiking. In short order, Bigfoot kills Michelle’s friend and starts chasing the hiker. Jack and the girls walk through the woods, occasionally stumbling on one of Bill’s Bigfoot traps. This goes on for about 40 minutes. That’s 2400 seconds of absolutely nothing happening.

The hiker stumbles upon a man walking through the woods, his face smeared in blood, eyes rolled white like a zombie, before being stabbed to death with a tree branch by a very angry Bigfoot. This is your first clue that something isn’t quite right about this particular Bigfoot film. You would be forgiven for forgetting all about that rock that crashed to Earth in the first five minutes. By this point, your brain has probably gone numb, and all you can think about is the sweet release of death. But that rock? Well, that wasn’t an ordinary rock.

Our crew takes Bill hostage just in time for Bigfoot to finally catch up. Cindy, who at this point hasn’t done a single thing but get naked and complain, goes full beast mode, stabbing the absolute high holy fuck out of Bigfoot before having her eyeball dislodged from her skull. Jack, useless as tits on a nun, gets knocked down and refuses to get up until the danger has passed. When he finally does, everyone is gone. Jack wanders off into the wilderness and mercifully stumbles upon the third act.

Did you guess that all this nonsense was being orchestrated by an evil alien who is using a Sasquatch to gather consumer electronics so that an army of undead, unpaid laborers can rebuild its spacecraft? Well, if you did, congrats on being schizophrenic. I didn’t see it coming, but then again, I’m not a lunatic. You would think this is where the film would turn into an action spectacular as Jack races to save his topless girlfriend from an alien monster and his dagger-wielding evil priest sidekick, but nope, it’s still in second gear. And that’s where it stays right up until the closing credits, trudging along like a dying cow, shitting everywhere as it limps off to die.

I can forgive bad acting. I can forgive bad directing. I can forgive bad effects. This film has all three. That last one, however, is the most shocking. The effects work (and the screenplay) was done in part by John Carl Buechler, one of the all-time great special effects guys. He’s credited with creating the Bigfoot suit used in the film. Now, I’ve seen a metric ton of Bigfoot movies in my life, and many (if not most) have terrible suits. This one is near the top. It’s maybe the worst full-body monster getup I’ve seen since RAWHEAD REX. It is utterly abysmal, with practically no articulation in the face. There’s nothing scary or convincing about it.

The alien and zombie effects are no better. The zombies in particular are just actors wearing cheap Halloween masks. No effort was put into making them look like anything other than that. None of that would have mattered if the movie had a pulse. As I said, I can forgive bad acting, bad directing, and bad effects, but I cannot forgive a movie for being boring. That’s exactly what DEMONWARP is. It is ungodly boring. This film had no right to be this spectacularly dull. I don’t know how you mash up five different sub-genres of horror and come away with only the worst elements of each, but kudos to DEMONWARP. It manages that task with ease. It’s not even worth watching to see George Kennedy being throttled by a man in a monkey suit. It is terminally tiring and glacially paced trash.