MOVIE REVIEW : A Predictable ‘Night of Demons’

Aficionados of truly bizarre and perverse makeup techniques in horror movies may find one shocking image in the otherwise turgid “Night of the Demons” (citywide) almost worth waiting for. Exactly what it entails can’t be described in a family newspaper, but suffice it to say that the effect involves the most, uh, imaginative use of a prosthetic breast in a special effect since the infamous topless scene in Ken Russell’s “Gothic.”

Indeed, the occasional makeup effects from gore-meister Steve Johnson late in the game provide what few thrills there are in this haunted-house thriller. To get to them requires waiting through an hour and a half of something even more horrific: movie teen-agers.

These aren’t just run-o’-the-mill obnoxious horror-flick teen-agers ready for the slaughter here, mind you. These are teen-agers who do absolutely nothing but shout witty obscenities at each other, jump out and scare each other, sexually harass each other.

They get their punishment, of course, when the title demons interrupt the raucous Halloween bash these wacky kids have decided to throw in an abandoned funeral parlor--a funky place outside town that was built on (award yourself five points for guessing this) ancient Indian burial grounds. One by one, the spirits possess and/or exterminate most of the brats on the premises, turning them into what look like zombies.

Who will be left alive? Will it be the lithesome female teen-slut types and their sex-crazed dates? Or could it be (give yourself more points here) the sole virginal blonde, along with the nice-but-cowardly token black man?

The young women in the cast seem to have been chosen not only for their anatomies, but also for their uniform ability to make their voices sound especially strident, under the unsympathetic direction of Kevin Tenney (“Witchboard”). Watching these struggling thespians shout profanity, have sex and then die in “Night of the Demons” (MPAA-rated R) is about as much fun as listening to Freddie Krueger scrape one of his long fingernails up and down a chalkboard for 89 minutes.