Bounding Into Halloween, Night 8: 90s Week Is Stuck In The Middle With ‘Tales From the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight’ & ‘Castle Freak’
We have reached the halfway point of our nostalgia trip into the 1990s, and things are already off the chain. Flannels are back in season, and a person’s sexuality is determined by which ear has the single-stud piercing. Tonight’s double feature is two favorites among horror fans that come from the somewhat magical year of 1995. One of them was a theatrical hit, and the other blew up on the home video market, but they’re both filled with that bloody, B-movie bliss.
Tales From the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight
MURDER…MADNESS…& MAYEM…and that’s just the fun part.
This feature-length episode of HBO’s beloved classic series, Tales From the Crypt, brings the Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir) to Hollywood for his directorial debut. The decomposing host with the most takes a break from berating the actors on set to break the Fourth Wall and present a completely different movie from the one he’s filming. He calls this tale…Demon Knight.
It has been a rough road for WW1 veteran, Frank Brayker (William Sadler). Aside from barely surviving that hideous stain on humanity’s history, Brayker’s commanding officer dupes him into becoming the guardian of an ancient key-shaped relic that’s capable of unleashing demons and sending all of existence into eternal darkness.
Naturally, the entire demon world makes him their prime target, and he spends the next 90 years evading them. That comes to an abrupt stop when he gets into a car wreck in New Mexico with a high-ranking demon known as The Collector (Billy Zane) on a desert road in the middle of the night. This leads to a boarding house full of quirky, soon-to-be mutilated tenants, and Frank’s final stand against the evil.
While it may be flawed, Demon Knight is still an enjoyable ride through campy horror, and it doesn’t go overboard, but the same can’t be said about its God awful 1996 sequel. It features Will Smith’s wife (whose name shall forever stay out of our f—ing mouths), Thomas Haden Church (Tombstone, Spider–Man 3), C.C.H. Pounder (ER, The X-Files), Dick Miller (A Bucket of Blood, The Howling, Gremlins 1 & 2), and the voice of Roger Rabbit himself (Charles Fleischer).
Tales From the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight is available on Prime. Instead of a trailer, here’s the music video for a song that became popular after the release of this movie:
Castle Freak
From the late/great director, Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, From Beyond, Fortress, Dagon), and Full Moon Features comes the disturbing direct-to-video hit, Castle Freak. Taking inspiration from the stories The Outsider (1926) and The Rats in the Walls (1926) by H.P. Lovecraft, it reunites horror icons Jeffery Combs and Barbara Crampton as a couple whose marriage is so far past the point of expiration that not even Herbert West’s Re-Agent can bring it back to life.
She still hasn’t forgiven him for getting into a drunken car wreck that killed their young son, and permanently blinded their teenage daughter (Jessica Dollarhide), nor is she very thrilled when the family has to travel to Italy because he inherited a 12th century castle from some mysterious Duchess, where the estate’s executor insists that they stay there until they’re finished with the liquidation process (aka the “On One Condition” trope).
If dragging a crumbling family unit to another country wasn’t bad enough, it turns out that the dearly departed Duchess went to her grave with a dark secret. Down in the dungeons of the castle lives her horribly disfigured, illegitimate son named Giorgio (Jonathan Fuller).
He has spent his entire life chained to a wall and received daily floggings from his mother, or at least that was until she died. After realizing that nobody was ever coming to feed (and beat) him, Giorgio severs his thumb to slip out of his manacles, then he heads upstairs to meet his new housemates and grab a few bites to eat.
The humor isn’t as prevalent when compared to the last movie, but it’s still there, just way darker. Crampton and Combs crush their roles, and Fuller looks awesome as Giorgio. Even if one can’t help but laugh at how he interacts with other people, especially with the ladies, Castle Freak is lurking over on TUBI.
Here’s the trailer:
NEXT: Bounding Into Halloween Honors The Sabbath On Night 5 With ‘The VVitch’ (2015) & ‘Warlock’ (1989)
