Demon Wind (1990)

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First off, Demon Wind is not about farts. If it were, it would most assuredly be a more interesting movie. Instead, it’s about a young man (Eric Larson) who drags a bunch of his friends to the ruins of his grandparents’ house in the middle of nowhere. The old folks died under mysterious circumstances sixty years ago, and junior’s suddenly curious to find out what might have happened to them. Once the guy gets there, some fog rolls in, people start spewing chunky pudding, and pimply demons with wet faces start popping up everywhere. It’s a little like Evil Dead, if Evil Dead sucked ass.

It’s clear writer/director Charles Philip Moore wanted to make a movie, probably just because he could. And while the production values, including makeup effects, are actually quite good, the script is really very, very bad. Awful, really. Characters are constantly pulling important plot points out of thin air, and there’s no consistent logic to the demons or their methods. There’s also no emotional consistency among the humans. One minute, the group sees a girl transformed into a bloody baby doll and presumed dead, and the next minute there’s a jealous spat between two other characters who either don’t care about their supernatural predicament or have an extremely short attention span. Absolutely none of the characters are interesting, and none of the cast leave the faintest impression.

It’s possible some may enjoy Demon Wind on the ‘so bad, it’s good’ level. The acting (especially Larson’s) is wooden at times, but not quite on the delightfully awful level of Troll 2. No, Demon Wind is merely bad. It’s clear the script was conceived in the hopes of occupying shelf space at video rental stores, and nothing more. There’s no point of view, there’s no style, and there’s little creativity. If I had to say anything nice about it, I’d say you won’t mind how bewildering it gets in the final ten minutes, because you will have stopped caring well over an hour before.