Night of the Demon

Night Of The Demon is a 1980 low-budget horror movie directed by James C. Wasson and written by Mike Williams, presenting a gory and occasionally quite unsettling take on the Bigfoot legend. Presented in flashback, the film tells the story of an anthropology class's all-too-successful expedition into the American wilderness to find the truth behind the Sasquatch legend. Along the way, the team learn about the creature's previous victims, uncover the squalid story of a hermit (Crazy Wanda) who gave birth to a mutation after being raped by the monster, and finally come face to face with the beast himself.

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Despite its technical shortcomings and frequently inane screenplay, Wasson's one and only film remains an engaging experience. Beneath the shoddy acting and muddled plotting, Night Of The Demon has a solid core of subversive unpleasantness, and the last half hour of the film contrives an atmosphere of genuine nihilistic gloom and foreboding. The scenes that the film has become most famous for, however, are another matter entirely - the depictions of castration, dismemberment and disembowelling are hardly convincing, but they are extremely graphic and helped to propel the film (released on video in the UK by Iver Film Services) onto the video nasties list. The film remained banned until 1993, when Vipco resubmitted it to the British Board of Film Classification, who agreed to pass it with an 18 certificate as long as almost two minutes of gory mayhem was deleted.

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