Abominable Advent Calendar Day 3: Demonwarp (1988)
Crapsterpiece Categories: AnythingSploitation; Straight to VHS; WTF Were You Thinking?
Heads up: contains blood, dismemberment, nudity, and clowns
As Demonwarp opens with something attacking a grandfather and daughter in a cabin in the woods, and then that something starts dismembering a bunch of twentysomethings with Aquanet mall bangs and acid-wash jeans who stay in the same cabin a year later, you might think you’re in for a run-of-the-mill Bigfoot movie. But oh, you would be so very, very wrong. As one rather dim character comments early on, “Hey man, there’s weird sh!t in these woods!”
The twentysomethings who survive the first night start walking to town and find the campsite of George Kennedy—who apparently owed someone scary a large amount of money, because why else would he be in this movie?—who plays the cranky grandfather who survived the first attack and wants some sweet Bigfoot payback. Somehow George has managed not to be savagely murdered while living in a skimpy tent that the exceptionally violent Bigfoot (he shoves a flaming log into someone’s belly) could knock over by sneezing.
But when Tara (played by Kennedy’s real-life daughter) and Betsy (played by scream queen Michelle Bauer) arrive in the woods looking for a marijuana field, and Bauer almost immediately gets naked, the movie flips into lunatic overdrive and leaves any semblance of logic behind completely. Its semi-incomprehensible storyline—with subplots that go nowhere involving characters you’ll forget as soon as they either die a horrible death or just wander off—suddenly starts chucking everything it can at you: aliens, devil worshippers, zombies, experimentation on humans, more nudity, a demented preacher, and the titular demon. Oh yeah, and a clown. It. Is. Schlock. Movie. Gold.
The whole thing is even more delightful once you realize Demonwarp was filmed in Bronson Canyon, where a ton of b-movies have been made, including The Brain from Planet Arous, It Conquered the World, and the infamous Robot Monster (you know, the one with the gorilla alien wearing the diving helmet).
So if “pure, unadulterated ‘80s crap” is on your gift list this year, Demonwarp might be just the thing for you.
