billy zane

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When I was in college, I went to the movies pretty much every weekend. Sometimes two or three times. I saw absolutely everything that I had even the slightest amount of interest in. I probably did have interest in Demon Knight when it came out, as I liked horror comedies. But I honestly don’t remember. What I do remember is watching it in the theater and absolutely loving it.

Demon Knight is branded as a Tales From the Crypt story. Tales From the Crypt originated as an anthology horror comic in the 1950s and was hosted by the Crypt-Keeper, a wise-cracking corpse. It has been revised in various formats over the years, including an HBO series that lasted from 1989 to 1996. I’d never read any of those comics, and I don’t think I’d watched any of the HBO episodes, but the Crypt-Keeper would pop up in commercials and things, so I was definitely familiar with the brand.

Demon Knight was successful enough that they commissioned a sequel, Bordello of Blood, which came out a year later. I hated that film. So much so that it completely turned me off the whole Tales From the Crypt thing, and I never watched anything from them again. I never even came back to Demon Knight. So I haven’t seen it in 30 years.

It is one of those films I’d periodically think about, and I’d think I should revisit it, but for whatever reason I never did. It seems to be a movie that’s more or less been forgotten by the culture. I never see anyone talking about it. There are lots of other movies like this – some I did watch when they came out, some I didn’t – that get brought up periodically in online discussions. Those I usually seek out and watch again. But the lack of discussion about this one meant that anytime it would pop into my mind, it usually popped right back out again.

I cut the cord years and years ago. I own a lot of DVDs, but I do subscribe to various streaming services. I’m one of those people who subscribes to one service for a month or two, and then I’ll cancel it so I can subscribe to something else. I figure there is only so much stuff you can watch in any given month, so why spend all your money subscribing to every service?

A couple of months ago, Starz had one of those super deals where you could subscribe to an entire year for like $20. I’ve subscribed to Starz before and remembered it being okay, so I signed up. Tonight is the first time I’ve actually watched anything on their service since I subscribed. Most of the stuff they have is of no interest to me, and the stuff I am interested in I’ve already seen and own on DVD.

But while looking for a horror movie to watch, I found this and decided to finally give it another go. Actually, what I really did was watch The Mothman Prophesies on Starz, the Richard Gere flick from 2002, but it was so god-awful I decided I didn’t want to write about it for my Friday Night Horror Movie, and I dug around Starz some more and found this.

For the first ten minutes or so I wished I hadn’t. This was not what I was wanting; my fears that it would not live up to my memories were coming true. But then I was able to click my brain off. I was able to enjoy the film for what it was actually doing, not what I wanted it to do.

What it does is create an incredibly goofy, violent, goopy, and funny little horror story with lots of comedic elements and some pretty good practical effects. Billy Zane is having the time of his life, too.

Zane plays a demon called The Collector, who is after a guy named Frank Brayker (William Sadler). Brayker has a powerful artifact known as the key, which the demons need to take over the world, but which also contains some of Christ’s blood, which can kill the demons.

Brayker holes up in an old mission turned hotel, and the film becomes a base-under-siege story. Also in the hotel are an assortment of people, including the sassy owner (CCH Pounder), an old man (Dick Miller), an ex-con (Jada Pinkett Smith), an asshole (Thomas Haden Church), and others.

The film doesn’t do anything particularly new with the concept. There is lots of infighting, attempts to sneak away, and a traitor, but it does it with gusto and a real sense of fun. I remember when I first watched it, one of the joys was watching Thomas Haden Church play a character completely different from the good natured goof he played on the TV show Wings. Here he cusses, drinks, and has a prostitute attach battery clamps to his nipples!

The demon designs are good, and it is a real treat to see how many practical effects they used. CGI was just getting started at this point, and there is some use of it here, but mostly the demons are made of real stuff, and the gore is visceral (and the blood was made out of glow stick juice!).

This is a film that understands it isn’t going to win awards. The Oscars will not be calling. But it does what it does well and has a blast doing it. I had a lot of fun watching it, too.

dead calm movie poster

When I was a young teen, probably sometime in the late 1980s my mother’s friend Beverly had a satellite dish and all of the premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. We only had basic cable at the time so I was in awe of all the movies she had access to. She was kind enough to allow me to send her requests of films I was interested in watching and she’d record them for me onto VHS tapes. I used to scour the TV Guide looking for movies for her to record.

When I got older and was living on my own I used to set the VCR to record old movies off of TCM and other cable channels. I had quite a collection of films dubbed off onto VHS tapes.

One film in that collection was Dead Calm. Unlike Firestarter this was a film I didn’t really know much about. Nicole Kidman was not yet a star and I didn’t know who Sam Neill or Billy Zane was. It is an Australian film and I don’t remember how much publicity it received in the USA. But at some point, I must have seen a trailer or read a synopsis and decided it sounded interesting. Thus I recorded it onto VHS tape.

But I never did watch it. It sat in that collection of tapes for years and years. When I’d go looking for something to watch I would see it, think to myself “I should watch that sometime” and then skip right past it. Many years later I got a digital copy of the film and yet I continued to put off watching it. One of the things I’m loving about this Awesome ’80s series is that I’m finally getting around to watching those sorts of films.

I should have watched this one much sooner as it is pretty terrific.

Kidman and Neill play Rae and John Ingram, a married couple who recently lost their only son in a terrible accident. They have taken off in their sailboat to sail the Pacific Ocean and forget about their troubles.

One day they spy a schooner that seems to be in some distress. They hail it to no accord. Before they can make their way over to see what the trouble is they see a man, Hughie (Zane) furiously rowing toward them in a dinghy.

He says that his boat is slowly sinking and that all the other crew is dead of food poisoning. But something seems off about him. When John indicates he’d like to sail over and check out the boat, Hughie becomes very agitated. He generally seems over-excited and behaves somewhat erratically.

When he finally crashes and falls asleep, John takes the dinghy over to the boat to investigate. What he finds is disturbing. But before he can come back to his boat, Hughie has knocked Rae unconscious and taken control of the boat.

The film becomes a tight thriller with Rae trying to escape from Hughie and John trying to survive the sinking boat long enough to be rescued. I loved the gender reversal of that. Typically in movies like this, the woman would be trapped helplessly by the villain and the male hero would rush in to rescue her. But here John must be saved by his wife after she subdues the villain.

Director Phillip Noyce keeps things moving briskly and the tension held tightly. The two boats, thousands of miles from anything but the ocean create a wonderful setting where the characters must survive on their own cunning and wits.

This was Kidman’s breakthrough role and she’s terrific. She gives her character confidence rarely seen from female characters in this type of movie, but she never loses her femininity. Sam Neill is great as well. He spends a great deal of the film alone on that sinking ship and he allows his character the fear that comes from such a situation but also a determination to survive. I’m not a huge Billy Zane fan and he doesn’t quite have enough crazy menace here, but he’s still effective.

I’m surprised this film hasn’t received more love. I’m really glad I finally decided to watch it.