Streaming Availability: Peacock
This has been a month of heavy important movies from Häxan to Hereditary, plus a lot of movies with deep philosophical ideas about the nature of good and evil. Your demon could be a representation of feminist trauma, the dissolution of faith, or a crisis of modernity, but blah blah blah. I just wanna have fun. A movie no pretensions or greater ambitions but a demon punching a sheriff right through his fucking face.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... BILLY ZANE!!! If you never appreciated him before, you have not seen Demon Knight.
First though: history. In the Fifties, publisher EC Comics under the leadership of William Gaines became infamous for a series of very popular horror comics. The most famous of these being Tales from the Crypt, which despite almost seventy years of influence on the course of American horror, only ran for thirty issues and a few years. A major censorship push against comics eventually drove EC out of the horror game and into making Mad Magazine, where its counterculture voice blossomed for decades. Stephen King was a huge devotee of the EC Comics philosophy, as seen in his Creepshow comic and 1982 film. King helped launch a major boom in pulp horror in the Seventies and Eighties. Thus in 1989, Tales from the Crypt was reborn as an HBO series. Before The Wire and The Sopranos, HBO's first original hits were this horror anthology show and stuff like Real Sex. The Tales TV show though somehow not on HBO Max, was a big deal. If you grew up in the Nineties you probably remember the pun-spewing Crypt Keeper puppet played by John Kassir. "Hello kitties!!"
So inevitably, there had to be a movie. Demon Knight was the script chosen, and I thank God for it. I love this movie. It is ninety minutes of gloopy monster slowly whittling down a cast of characters, with some fun effects, and of course, Billy Zane's best ever role. However, Demon Knight does not really fit in mold of a Tales from the Crypt comic or episode. Those are usually short moral fables, usually about the wronged dead returning for revenge. The introduction of Demon Knight has the Crypt Keeper directing a short lurid tale of a wife killing her husband and getting attacked by his zombie in the tub. (With gratuitous nudity, of course.) That is more the tone of Tales. What former Spike Lee cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson films is more a simple horror action comedy. No cultural commentary or big lesson.
Unless that lesson is: do not trust Billy Zane in a cowboy hat. Or in any of his many costume changes.
Demon Knight has a fantastic cast, far better than you'd think for a silly B-movie about silly monsters, though exactly what it needs. Billy Zane is The Collector, the higher order demon that arrives in New Mexico searching for a magical Key. His prey is Brayker (William Sadler), the Key's guardian, a semi-immortal WWI vet who is chased by an army of shambling corpses right to the door of an abandoned church turned halfway house. The residents of that house include Thomas Haden Church, C. C. H. Pounder in a fat suit (to hide her arm when it gets torn off), Jada Pinkett not-yet-Smith, and schlock legend Dick Miller. Most of these characters are here to get killed off, but usually in inventive ways, often transforming into goblins or slimy special effects. Eventually Jada Pinkett Smith's Jeryline will grow to be the "final girl".
Really though we need to talk about Billy Zane. The Collector is a role so much fun that it will make you root for Cal over Jack the next time you see Titanic. Demon Knight is not a poorly-paced movie but it lags between Billy Zane scenes because he's so good in the ten minutes or so he's on screen. He responds to "vaya con dios" with "vaya con diablos". He whines when his favorite pair of sunglasses get destroyed. He tries to seduce Jeryline but is unable to say the word "love" due to being from Hell. After bowling a dead cop's head, the Collector stomps outside tossing away his disguise: "Fuck this cowboy shit! You fucking hoedown, podunk, well them there motherfuckers!" Poetry truly.
I could just list all his lines and name every single gag and call that a review.
The non-Billy Zane parts of Demon Knight are not bad either. Ernest Dickerson does not quite capture the wonderful comic style of source material as George A. Romero did in Creepshow. Mostly Demon Knight is comic book-y through its use of dutch angles. Still we get great monster effects. Especially once Billy Zane is stealing the souls of the cast, and they transform into practical ghouls. Maybe the best is the little kid, Danny (Ryan O'Donohue), whose transformation is metafictionally predicted by the very Tales from the Crypt comic he's reading. We see him as some rat monster without a jaw on the page, and then, next shot, Danny is now that very horror.
The demonology is thin. I can live with that. Turns out Brayker is a successor to a long line of Demon Knights, tracing their origins back to Jesus Christ himself. (Who was weirdly absent this month, only appearing in The Visitor.) This magic Key holds Christ's blood, and many other people's fluids, which can be used to burn away demons like a crucifix on a vampire. The Knights travel the Earth akin to the antisemitic folktale of the Wandering Jew. Jeryline will be the next in the line after Demon-Danny chews through Brayker's chest and sticks his snake tongue through his heart, great gore gag. And the demons are just demons, no real lore to them. Billy Zane's character has no back story and no context, he's just this wisecracking good time for the fun of it.
Apparently the producers considered using Quentin Tarantino's From Dusk Till Dawn script as their next Tales from the Crypt movie. That would have been perfect, that is a very similar movie to Demon Knight, both desert adventures leading to very wacky special effects extravaganzas. (I do love them both, I reviewed Dusk Till Dawn last year.) I could easily see Selma Hayak as a snake lady in the same franchise as Billy Zane giving a newborn demon a kiss. Instead the second Crypt movie was Bordello of Blood starring Dennis Miller, who is not a good actor - and a much worse political commentator. There's a third movie called Ritual that released quietly in 2002. I saw it once with all the John Kassir puppetry parts removed, and remember nothing about it.
Ernest Dickerson would go on to make the 2001 Snoop Dogg neo-blaxploitation horror film Bones and you should definitely watch Bones. I wish he had more horror movies in his career.
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Anyway, that's that. Another year of 31 (well really 33) horror reviews. Next year could be about anything: haunted houses, aliens, zombies, Scooby Doo. Who knows? All I know is that I will not be covering The Exorcist: Believer 2.
Until then, Happy Halloween!
Your blog has been instrumental in broadening my perspective.
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