Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick.
And today on Weird House Cinema, we returned to one of our favorite subgenres, a good old fashioned squatch movie. It's been a while, though. The last time we discussed a Bigfoot or Sasquatch film was Boggy Creek two back in twenty twenty, so we're long overdue for a little Sasquatch action. We're gonna be discussing nineteen eighty eight's Demon Warp, which absolutely does feature a Sasquatch on the rampage in southern California, but with some delirious added twists and turns as well.
Is the Sasquatch movie one of our favorite subgenres.
I feel like it is for me.
I think it is in theory, if not in practice.
It is definitely one of those where if someone asked me on the street, hey, you like Bigfoot movies? Yeah, I love Bigfoot movies. And then if they were to challenge me and say give me your top five, I might be able to give you a top two.
Yeah, you know, Boggy Creek. It's pretty gross, But I do kind of love A Night of the Demon, and I have fond memories of Shriek and the Mutilated, but I haven't seen it in a while. But we were discussing off Mike that a lot of sasquatch movies are just nastier than you remember or than you would expect them to be. Like, it seems like it would almost seem to be a relatively wholesome subgenre of horror. But yeah, a lot of squatch movies are just gross, dude.
As we've discussed on the show before, at least back in the Boggy Creek days, back in twenty twenty, you basically have two sorts of cinematic squatch movies. You have films about the savage squatch, and you have films about the noble squatch. One kills you, one teaches you. One is a terrorizing beast, the other is a wise man of the One connects with our own inner and outer savagery,
our fear of the wilds. The other represents our high regard for the holy mystery of nature and our attitudes concerning the encroachment of the modern world on the natural world, and obviously these two can overlap or one can turn
out to be the other. But it's interesting to reflect on these because I do think that by and large, most films are going to fall into one category or the other, like Harry and the Henderson's Noble Squatch obviously Boggy Creek two definitely a noble squatch film, and today we're going to balance the scales with a savage squatch film, which is also probably interesting to think about because I feel like in the contemporary zeitgeist, in a world speaking
of at least of the US here in the United States, that seems to be more and more obsessed with Bigfoot, with sasquatch. I see it, you see it, I'm bumper stickers. You see more roadside attractions kind of these kinds of cryptids than ever before. Cutes the appreciation, cutes the appreciation, and I think maybe a little a little woo woo
kind of almost you know, occultist sensibility kind of. I think very much the idea of the noble squatch being the main focus, the idea that on some level I'm connecting with some sort of a holy spirit of the wild, not a savage monster that wants to beat down my door and kill a family member.
This was very much my experience. Did I tell you about the experience that we had at the Bigfoot Museum in North Georgia where we overheard a woman there giving a report to the curator at the museum about her own encounter. It was very much in the noble squatch zone. She was talking about how in woods near where she lived.
I don't want to give away any identifying detail, but I remember part of the story was that she was upset because there were local teenagers, hooligan's whoever, who had been riding a TV through his woods and that's his sacred place and they were disrespecting it.
I mean, really, it seems troubled hacan ideas here, right, yeah, Forest Guardian, Yeah, so yeah, it's it's interesting to take that and then can consider a film like nineteen eighties Night of the Demon, which is another Southern California savage squatch film, but like you said, a much nastier one. Demon War by comparison, is pretty tame, though still features a lot of slasher movie violence and also at least top only slasher movie nudity.
Yeah, I know what you're saying it is kind of weird to think about this as a less nasty film because it still has a lot of It has a lot of violence and gore effects, but it's certainly less nasty than the Sasquatch films, which classify Bigfoot as like a sex criminal of the woods, which is the that's always kind of a bummer.
Yeah, there's none of that in Demon Warp. Our Squatch is savage, but he has a has a different agenda in mind.
Now, there's another thing we should flag at the beginning, about a way to forget what this is called. Not Knight of the Demon, this is Demon Warp. Two different war Demon Squatch, Demon Warp.
Yeah, one word, by the way, Demon Warp.
Interrogate the title later. But one thing I like about Demon Warp is that I detect in it a failure that I myself am prone to in creative work, which is a failure to narrow the scope of the project commensurate with the actual limitations on what can be achieved. Do you ever have this problem, Rob, Like you're writing a story and you just want to bring in too many things really for the amount of space or time you have.
Yeah, it'll be because I think sometimes you have as inspiration, a kind of kaleidoscope flash of ideas, and then once you try putting that on paper or whatever your medium might be, you might run into problems and realize, well, maybe this isn't the most economic thing. I can't fit all of it in. Yeah, and I do think there's something going on here, very similar with Demon Warp.
Yeah, I need to pick a subset of this, these things and focus on them. But Demon Warp says, no, I reject that. I will do it all, and I won't necessarily do it all in a way that's very developed or thought through, but I'm going to do it all in some way or another, and I admire the audacity there. So spoiler's incoming this episode we are going to The movie does have major twists and surprises in it,
and we're about to spoil them. So warning, if you want to go into the movie without knowing anything, you should stop here go check it out. But you might assume, based on the marketing for the film that this is just another bigfoot horror movie, but the Bigfoot angle is really only about sixty percent of the film. This is also surprisingly to varying degrees. I took some notes here. It's an alien invasion movie. It is a zombie movie, like a shambling undead film. It is sort of a
slasher movie. It is a mind control body possession movie. It is a religious cult thriller with human sacrifice. It is a creature effects showcase. And it is a vehicle on which to deliver a huge amount of narratively implausible nudity.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's all right. And then at the same time, nobody's gonna leave this picture saying, man, I thought this was a sad squatch movie, which there is more squatch. There's a line of squatch. Yeah, and they don't.
They don't delay it.
It does.
They don't make you wait to the end to see it. And they don't they're not shy about squatch, like hiding in behind trees and stuff. You see full squatch in like the second scene where he appears.
Yeah, the squatch looks great. We see a lot of it. This I think is going to tie into its effects world origins, and most of the films them just broad daylight. Yeah, Like we've seen this before with other Southern California rural
horror sci fi films. They all seem to be filmed around two pm, maybe one pm in the afternoon, you know, where I'm less concerned about the otherworldly dangers at play, and I'm more concerned if everyone's getting enough water to drink, because it looks kind of hot, dry.
Yeah, very very familiar looking woods. If you've watched low budget movies before, you feel like, I've seen these woods. I've seen this road.
I've seen this cave. Yeah.
Wasn't this in a two thousand and four made for the Sci Fi Channel movie I watched? Yep, it was probably in five or six of those.
I would assume sometimes these these B movie sci fi productions just run into each other in these woods, you know, and they're like, oh, this is a different monster from a different film. Well keep rolling anyway.
So, despite the fact that I think it only loosely relates to the plot, it sort of does. But I don't know you can render a judgment on it in a moment. I think the kitchen sink energy of Demon Warp is pretty well captured in the tagline from a vintage poster that you sent me, or maybe not poster. I think this may have actually been VHS box art.
Yeah, The theatrical poster is really good. We'll come back to that in a minute. But the VHS box art is pretty pretty goofy.
So here's the text on it. It says somewhere between light and shadow, ancient fear, future shock, the living and the undead lies the realm of Demon Warp.
Yeah, I mean mentioning future shock in there. It's very little future in this movie, but it does. You are right, This does capture a sense of what's going on here.
Also, why are there tombstones on this Do you see the tombstones? Is there a braveyard in the movie?
No, no, but but there, Yeah, it sure is on this box art. Why is George Kennedy's head floating like a glowing like sun sphere in the middle of the poster. I don't know.
It would suggest he is like Clarence the Angel in this movie, a heavenly being looking down on the proceedings below. It's the poster makes it look like it's going to be about a reptile man who attacks a cemetery full of zombies, while George Kennedy the Angel is the heavenly guardian of teen Wolf.
Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, they try to do a lot of things in Demon Warp. But you know, that's why we're talking about it because it is a it is a huge swing, and it's a miss in many ways. But oh man, the energy, the audacity.
As you said, now, I know you wanted to come back to the title demon Warp. Are you where how they got there? Where that name came from.
They might have touched on it in like some part of the commentary track that I didn't listen to, but my guess is that they allude to this being demon Wood or demon Woods, I believe, And it sounds to me like someone was like, let's call it demon Woods, and they were like, no, demon Warp. We want to get that sci fi element into the title.
I was wondering if it could be that the warp refers to the way, again spoilers for the ending, how human bodies are in fact being warped by alien technology to become bigfoot bodies.
I think that's as good as we're going to get. Okay, I think that works.
Yeah, Well, that leads right into if I had to do an elevator pitch for the movie or a little tagline, it's got to be Invasion of the body Squatchers.
That's pretty good. I can't beat that, all right. Well, at this point you might be wondering, hey, where can I watch this fascinating sounding picture? Where can I watch Demon Warp? One word? Well, it was very recently released on Blu Ray by Vinegar Syndrome with a whole load of extras, newly scanned and restored in four K from its thirty five milimeter original camer net negative. I rented this one from Atlanta's own video drome. Here's my rental disc, and Joe, I believe you pick you pick up a
copy of this one, right? I did.
It took a while to arrive, and so I didn't the first time I tried to watch the movie. We were going to record it this past Monday, and over the weekend, I'm waiting for my disc to come in and it's not coming in. The delivery date just keeps getting pushed back, and I'm like, where is my Squatch movie? I've got to watch this. So I was aware that there's a YouTube rip out there, and I was like, well, I'll just have to watch that, you know, to get
through so we can record the movie. But folks, this is one of the lowest res YouTube rips i've ever seen. The pixels were gargantuan, and so I did. For example, in the opening scene, there is a spaceship, an alien spaceship that crashes on Earth, and in the scene where a character is approaching it, I did not realize it was a spaceship because it just looks like a boulder.
Yeah, so you're missing vital detail here, not just like I wish I could see that that monster mask in a little more detail, right.
Not just like that, like you are unable to tell who's talking or whatever, because because the rip is so.
Bad, I think for a long time, even if you had access to VHS or something, I think that the copies of Demon Warp were just not that good.
Yeah. So anyway, so this was I was afraid I was going to have to go with this very low quality version, but we put off recording folks. We delayed it just so that I could get the disc and watch it as it's meant to be seen. So I watched it in four K, and it's gorgeous. It's a excellent, gorgeous, cheaply made but still beautiful today.
All right, well, let's get into the folks behind this picture, starting with the director. It's directed by Emmitt Alston. I'm not really sure how old this guy is, but I think he's still with us based on his participation in the extras for the film. American director perhaps best remembered, or at least up until now, for the nineteen eighty slasher New Year's Evil. It's like a New Year's ev horror movie. So you know, you've got to take note
of all the different holidays that are covered. Outside of Demon War, most of his remaining credits are just Eighties action schlock. So there's eighty seven's Tiger Shark. There's the nineteen eighty five ninja film Nine Deaths of the Ninja, but it does have a show Kasugi in it. Then he also did eighty eight Fours of the Ninja. No Kasugi in that one, and then ninety three's Little Ninja's also no Kasugi.
Wait Little Ninja. Oh no wait, I'm thinking of Three Ninjas. He didn't do Three Ninjas.
No no, there are a few other like kid based ninja films that have nothing to do with this particular picture. Yeah, Okay, Like I say, I think most people are going to know him for Demon War or New Year's Evil.
Now, Rob, I wonder if you agree with me here.
I don't know if it was just a cinematic as cibo effect because I knew the name we're about to discuss was associated with this film, But I could not help but keep feeling some shared DNA between this movie and a couple of other movies we've watched, one of which is Friday the Thirteenth, Part seven, the one with the psychic girl in it, and another is The Dungeon Master, the sort of Charles Band his own film we saw that was that turned out to be an anthology film
that was basically a creature effects workshop showcase. And both of those movies are associated with a guy named John Carl. I think his name is pronounced bee Cler. It looks like it's spelled buler b u e c h l e R. Did you get that same feeling, feel that that energy coursing through it?
Yes, especially with the creature designs, because in the ultimate picture here he has a story credit and he built the creatures, And if you've seen enough of Beekler's work, you can kind of recognize there's something about it. I don't know, you can almost see him in the monster designs, you know, a distinctive monster design style. And I can also see these other connections for drawing here on here. But then again, I like, you went into it knowing that his DNA would be in there somewhere.
Right, Like I said, I knew as well. So I maybe I'm not as perceptive as I think I am, but I felt like I could detect it, not just in the very distinctive puppet design, like the alien we get to at the end of this movie is just pure this guy, but like it looks like the creature that he created for the Dungeon Master. But it's not
just that. It's something about the story structure too. Feels like Friday Part seven, the way that about a third of the way through the movie, certain random characters that have not been mentioned before just show up one during in the woods to increase the body count, almost like a third of the way through the script anxiety of like, ooh, we need to get some more people in here, so here are some campers. Yeah that it just feels like him.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I think that's spot on. Yeah. John Carl Biechler, who lived nineteen fifty two through twenty nineteen, he was a practical special effects and makeup really legend did a lot of great work. He's come up on the show before because he did special effects on eighty six's The Eliminators as well as Terror Vision from the
same year, eighty nine's Arena. Yeah, something about I don't know, I'd really have to like look at the specific character designs, but there's something about, like the way the skulls are shaped, the kind of monsters he drew and then created in three D.
He's got a little goblin heart. It's just the goblininesses coming through and everything. Even in the bigger beings, they have some inherent little kind of gobliny critics to them.
M yeah, yeah, absolutely. His effects work include such cult favorites as re Animator, Tammy and the t Rex and Goolies. We mentioned him in our episode on Dungeon Master because I believe he directed one of the segments on there, yeah, or the wrap around material, so he did some directing on it, and then he also helmed the likes of eighty six's Troll, eighty seven's Cellar Dweller, eighty eight's Friday
the Thirteenth Part seven, The New Blood. You mentioned it already, but you know, arguably one of the best Fridays and terrific Jason makeup in that one. Agreed. He also directed nineteen nineties Gooleies Three Goolies Go to College that has Kevin McCarthy in it. I believe he plays a professor.
I did just want to briefly say I agree that Friday Part seven has the most enjoyable makeup effects of the series. I think it has the best undead Jason design, and it also just has some innerting human villains. Like it's not a well written movie, but somehow, despite being poorly written, it has great writing elements, like its villains are just so like it's got this evil psychiatrist character played by Terry Kaiser who's hilarious, and it's just a it's a fun ride.
So on this one, Beekler has the story credit and apparently wrote an initial screenplay and originally intended to direct it himself. But you know, clearly we're mentioning these are key years for Beekler, and you know he was probably working on one of these other projects at the time and those took off, this one got left behind. But there was already like money tied up in the project. There were already you know, some sort of production put together,
so other folks came on. We'll get to those of them in just a second. You know, additional rewrites of the screenplay and his his monsters designs also remained in the film, and some of these effects and costumes that he'd already worked on. Apparently there was also some sort of like an Aztec mummy and maybe a tentacle monster based This is based on some of the interviews and extras on the Vinegar Syndrome disc that were not used
in the final picture. But we definitely get the sasquatch and the alien creature from the end of the end of the film. Those are Beechler all the way. What about the zombies, I don't know that he did any of the zombie effects. The zombies look great too, but I think that's other effects folk that contributed to that. I could be wrong, but I don't think those are Beeler.
It's a bummer we didn't see the other things. I want to see that mummy.
Yeah, yeah, I think it was a mummy. It definitely they mean someone mentioned a tentacle monster. All right. Getting to the writers, Well, the main one. There are two gentlemen that are credited. There's Jim Burt Geese and then there's a guy by the name of Bruce Akayama. Bruce Akayama I think only has this one credit. Bert GE's his only other two writing credits are episodes of the animated series JC and Wield Warriors or JAC and the
Wield Warriors and Challenge of the Gobots. I think these were like two different Transformers rip offs from around eighty five. I could be wrong in that. I don't want to mischaracterize mid eighties cartoons, but I think that's the case.
But yeah, he's interviewed on the Vinegar Syndrome disc and he talks about like basically, he and Bruce Akiyama were fanboys who jumped at the chance to work on a script like this, and you know, they had the task of taking this pre existing Beakler script and cleaning it up, believe it or not, making it a little more cohesive, like making characters show up for reasons when before they didn't have any reason to show up, and in general in general, getting it into shooting shape.
This is a script where I feel like I can detect the different layers of revision or drafting in it, do you know what I'm saying. Yeah, Like, there's one scene that seems to happen twice. Yeah, the scene where the characters meet George Kennedy's character has some very similar elements. It almost feels like it got moved and then edited, but they didn't take out the other one.
Yeah. One of the things that it was really interesting in the Birche's interview is that he's talking about like just the physical labor of rewriting the script. And this is something so easy to take for granted. You and I have both done you know, screenplay scripting work before, and of course, you know, we have the glorious wonders of word process or technology, and word have dedicated programs for screenwriting. But back, like back in the day, you're
doing it on the typewriter. So I don't know, I feel like I need to be even more gentle with folks who were writing these scripts, because, man, give me an old timey typewriter and ask me to write anything, and I'm just going to make a mess of myself.
Have you ever tried to write anything on a typewriter though?
When I was a kid? Yeah, Okay, I've.
Never done anything very long, but I have experiments with the typewriter, and one thing I noticed that's interesting about it is it doesn't permit you to spend as much time fiddling and editing as you go, which.
Can be a good thing. Yeah.
You kind of have to commit to a sentence once you've written it, which is you know, or you can think like, well, if I'm not happy with that, I'm just gonna have to fix it later on the full rewrite. You can't waste as much time just getting bogged down doing the same paragraph over and over. And I like that in a way.
Yeah, yeah, it's a great point. Yeah, all right, let's get into the cast here, starting with the top billing. The biggest star here, the only Oscar winner in the cast, and that is George Kennedy, who plays Bill Crafton.
There are two sides of the George Kennedy we get here. On one hand, you can tell that he's like, what the heck is this? What's going on? But on the other hand, he's not phoning it in. He's really he's a pro. He's like, Okay, I am Bill Crafton. I'm here because Squatch took my daughter and now you know, I haven't been dead against Squatch and that's what I do.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, He's he's solid here. I mean, you're not. This is no cool hand Luke the sixty seven film for which he Aaron you know, definitely earned his Oscar. But you know, Kennedy's great and just about anything, no matter how ridiculous it is. We previously talked about George Kennedy in our episode on The Uninvited, in which he plays one of the henchmen. Oh I forgot about that. Yeah,
that was pretty recent too, That was pretty recent. Yeah, but it wasn't you know, it wasn't a strong role. And you know, he's one of those guys, that big fella he could play and intimidating hnchman, but he could also play was probably better at playing good natured lugs. Yeah, and we're more in the good natured lug category here as opposed to you know, just a pure heavy.
Oh I just remembered. Yeah, he is one of the henchmen of Wall Street Walter, Yeah, Uninvited.
Yeah, yeah, the Killer Cat movie. So yeah. Here, he's a father who lost his daughter to the savage Squatch demon Wood and his hell bent on revenge via a seemingly limitless arsenal of acme bear traps and dynamite.
He comes with gear.
Yeah yeah, So go back and listen to our episode of The Uninvited for more about George Kennedy if you so desire. But yeah, he's He's been in a ton of He was in a ton of films over the course of his career, sometimes more comedic, but also he dabbled in horror a bit. And yeah he did, he did. He brings it here, you know. He said he was said to be a really nice guy in Seat Real Pro. And he also brought his own stuntman and yellow cap so that he could trade out the yellow cap with
his stunt man. And apparently that was his idea. He's like, they're only going to be looking at the cap in the action. They're not going to notice as much that it's my stunt double.
Wait, is the yellow cap in the script then?
Or was that?
No?
He brought that that was his thing.
I felt like that was one of the best story details his character had. It was just his ad lived there because he later on he says, Oh, I wear this yellow hat because I want Squatch to see me. You know he wants to bring the fight to Squatch.
It made me briefly go on a tangent where I was looking up images of George kennedyan films with hats on, and I was like, did he wear a funny hat in everything?
Like?
Was this just something he insisted on so that he felt like his stunt double would be more believable. But I don't know. I couldn't really figure that out, but I did see a lot of like he's wearing sombreros, he's wearing everything. Now, Kennedy apparently only agreed to do this film as long as they found a part for
his daughter, Shannon. And we'll get to Shannon here in a bit, But you might expect that Shannon would play this character's daughter who gets killed by the Squatch, And like the first twenty minutes of the picture, now.
The first twenty minute, the first five.
Five minutes, Yeah, it happens really quickly, so you'd kind of expect her to be cast in that role. But that's not the case. Maybe they already had somebody lined up, and that that somebody was an actress by the name of Jill Marin. Find out anything about her. I believe this is her only credited role. She plays Julie Crafton.
She's in the movie for like eighty five seconds and she yeah, yeah, so yeah, I don't really have much to say about her because she's so brief. It's one of these characters where they're setting her up when you first meet her, like, Okay, this is going to be our main character, and then she's just gone and then never comes back.
All right, So those are the Craftons. But now let's get to this. Let's get to the who I think of as the gang. This is our main core group of young people, and they're also sort of amateur squatch investigators, or at least one of them is. And the restaurant along for the ride.
Yes, one of them is a squatch investigator, and he is trying to trick the others into squatch investigating with him by luring them to the woods on the promise of a holiday. Yeah, and that's a cruel trick to play in your friends.
Yeah. But this character that are sort of our lead male character here is Jack and he is played by David Michael O'Neill. Not sure how old this particular actor is, but American actor active from about eighty five through twenty twenty. It seems like kind of looks like a young Kurt Russell here.
Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing. Reminds me a bit of Kurt Russell. Not with the same level of charm or charisma, but he looks a lot like Kurt.
Yeah. His acting style in this seems to go from like normal, like handsome dude in a slasher or slasher adjacent picture, to like almost kind of like psycho action mode, like unhinged action hero character.
I have a comment about our main five young characters later when we get to the plot section, I'll talk about it, Okay. The gist is that all five of them, basically and especially like three of them, are very inconsistently characterized, so they're kind of hard to describe as characters because they change from scene to scene.
Yeah, and again we can attribute a lot of this to the fact that clearly this was a monster's first design. Here. You know, this film originates with the monsters. Humans were added because humans are apparently necessary for pictures like this, and maybe and it might be a shame that you have to have the humans and in such a movie.
Now that would be ambitious thinking about doing it the other way. You could do an alien zombie squatch movie, but it's just those things. So it's like aliens are in the woods hunting for squatch and they encounter zombies.
There you go, Yeah, somebody ride it all right? Well, David Michael O'Neill here he got into writing and directing in the nineties. He directed and co wrote a nineteen ninety nine film titled Five Aces, and that one starred Charlie Sheen and Christopher MacDonald. Yeah. We'll come back to more about this performance later, but this is our protagonist. This is our hero, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Now playing
his girlfriend Carrie is Pamela Gilbert. So Pamela Gilbert was coming off of the Troma film Lust for Freedom from eighty seven, as well as a pair of Fred Olin ray films from the same year, Cyclone, which I think is a motorbike film and Evil Spawn, which I believe is aliens of one sort or another, as well as some earlier modeling work and so forth. She'd retire from
acting the year after Demon Warp. Gilbert went on to have an accomplished career ongoing career as an English professor, author and expert in nineteenth century British literature in the history of the body and medicine. She has several books out and was looking at somebody's that look quite interesting. They include twenty nineteen's Victorian Skin Surface Self History. Yeah.
I thought that was that's a cool transition, going from the Bigfoot movies to the literary journals.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, let's talk about the rest of the gang here. We also have a character Tom, and it's confusing because, especially early on, Tom looks a whole lot like Jack and I had trouble telling them apart. But Tom is played by Billy Jane born nineteen sixty nine. Child actor turned teen actor turned well grown up actor,
director and producer. As a kid, best remembered for roles on TV, including twenty six episodes of the Bad News Bears series and later as a supporting character on the series Silver Spoons. He also did an episode of Tales from the Dark Side, and in his film credits he played he was in a film we proved. No, we've never talked about this. This is a particular film on Weird House. I'm sorry, we talked about the second Beast
Master movie. But this guy as a kid was in eighty two's The beast Master playing the young Dar, so that our young beast Master in flashback?
Okay, are we gonna have to go back and do beast Master one even though we've already done two.
We should? We probably should. It's so much fun. You know, you got ripped torn as the villain. It's yeah, it's one of my favorite.
Wait oh it was wings Hauser and.
Yeah, yeah, wings Hauser in the sequel. The sequel's great too, but the sequel's decidedly stupider. Yeah, and a lot of fun. But anyway, So this guy played Dar in eighty two as the beast Master. He was also in eighty three's Kujo as a child actor, and he's in the eighty five teen comedy and very loose Twelfth Night adaptation Just one of the Guys, which I vaguely remember watching as a young person, and I remember liking it back in the day. I do not know how it holds up.
His other credits include eighty one's Bloody Birthday and Hospital Massacre, eighty two's Superstition, and eighty nine's Doctor Alien. He remained active as an actor and directed multiple music videos, including various Buck Cherry music videos.
It seems, Oh, did he do the one for I Love the Cocaine.
I don't know, but we had we had a buck Cherry connection in Gargoyles, like one of the band Memory Fathers was in Gargoyles, So I don't know I had. I don't know much about buck Cherry, but I think they're Anaheim bass so maybe they were just like various connections to the Internet entertainment industry there. And then I dug a little deeper and I saw that their bass player is a huge Sasquatch enthusiast. So I don't know the conspiracy widens.
How did you find? Were you just googling the band members plus Sasquatch?
I was, Yes, that's the that's the that's the professional research that I'm involved in. But I got a hit on it, so amazing, it works. I love it all right, So we're not done with the gang here. We also have Fred. Fred is played by Hank Stratton born nineteen sixty one. He's appeared in various TV shows between eighty seven and twenty eleven, including Perfect Strangers, mcguiver Saved by the Bell Murder. She wrote Fraser Silk stalkings, er and heroes.
I'm just mad they didn't give this guy an ascot.
Yeah, he could have used one. It would have helped us differentiate more, all right. And then we also have Cindy played by Colleen McDermott born nineteen sixty five. She was coming off fourteen episodes of As the World Turns, and she'd go on to appear in episodes of Murder. She wrote Days of Our Lives, Dream on Charmed and CSI Miami.
So those are our main five, but they're not the only characters who show up.
That's right, because we're also going to get a couple of a couple of stoner babes who are have headed out into the woods to harvest some bud and maybe do a little sunbathing in demon woods. So the first of these is Betsy, and Betsy is played by certified b movie scream queen Michelle Bauer born nineteen fifty eight, best known for her work in the films of Fred Olin Ray So she's in eighty eight's Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, eighty seven Cyclone and also eighty seven is The Phantom Empire.
She's also been in such pictures as eighty eight's Nightmare Sisters, ninety one's puppet Master three, as well as some notable weird deep cuts like eighty two's Cafe Flesh.
So I don't think I had ever seen a movie with Michelle Bauer in it before, but she is a great screen presence and really funny, obviously has a great sense of humor. And I thought it was ironic because there's an interview on one of the Vinegar Syndrome discs with her where she talks about doing the movie, and she's explaining at the beginning of this interview that she
had done some modeling and some live performances. I think she mentioned mud wrestling, yeah, wrestling, yeah yeah, And she says like, okay, so you know she'd done this stuff, but she didn't have any interest in being in movies because she thought of herself like, oh, I don't know anything about acting, you know, I don't have any acting skills. But I think she's easily the best actor in the movie.
I mean, I don't I've never seen her in a dramatic role, so I couldn't comment either way on that, But just in terms of being a funny, entertaining screen presence, she's like the most charismatic person the film, and she's funny. I think even in scenes where the writing isn't itself all that funny, like she makes it work. Almost seems to be kind of riffing on the movie she's in
in her scenes. One of the best examples is so she's like driving up into the mountains with her friend and they're supposed to be harvesting some cannabis from an illegal grow site. And they get there and there's nothing there. It's like all been taken. And then she just kind of like looks at the camera and they're up in the demon woods and she's like, well might as well tan,
Like she's I don't know. It felt almost like an improvd line at the implausibility of the next scene, which you know they had to get to somehow.
Yeah, yeah, with the top coming up. Yeah, Yeah, I agree. I think Michelle Bauer is great here and yeah easily has a natural charisma that works exceptionally well in a B movie like this. Now. Her friend that you mentioned, who were told his name, Kara, is played by Shannon Kennedy. This is George Kennedy's daughter and the reason he agreed to be in this film to begin with. I guess she just wanted to try her hand at acting, or
to do a project with her dad. Even if it's a film where her head gets ripped off by a sasquatch while she's sunbathing, you know, it's still I guess kind of sweet that they're in the same picture here. I don't think she did any other films.
Wanted to be in a movie. So I play a character who is looking for marijuana, fails to find it, and then gets head ripped off by sasquatch.
Yeah, there you go. I mean, by this point in his career, George Kennedy probably seen it all anyway, so he didn't think twice about any of it. Yeah, so he's like, yeah, yeah, this is welcome to the Welcome to the movie industry, kid. Or maybe he wanted it to be a picture like this, like like, you don't want to be an entertainment, let me find a good one to agree for us, to agree to us to be in.
I think she qualifies as the most eighties looking of the people in the movie. She's got a bit of a Cindy lawper thing going on.
Yeah, all right, well, so far we've had we've got Kennedy. We've got a bunch of young people. We have a sasquatch. But you got to have a creep in here somewhere, and that's where our next actor comes in. This is John Durbin playing the Minister. I'm not sure how old John Durbin is. He's been around for a while and I think is still active. I see that he's attached to some sort of upcoming Eli Roth related picture. But yeah, he's a creepy, highly animated thin dude, and there's always
a space for someone like that in genre pictures. Durbin had already been active on the screen in TV since eighty three. He'd played I think his film debut was playing Radio Corpse Number one in eighty five's Return of the Living Dead, So early zombie roll there for him. Subsequent credits included two episodes of TV's Max Headroom, nineteen eighty nine's Doctor Caligari, ninety one's doll Man, ninety four's witch Hunt That's the sequel to cast a Deadly Spell?
Is Hopper in the lead, Yeah, TV's The Shining In ninety seven, and episodes of Star Trek's Next Generation Deep Space nine and Voyager, playing I think different different aliens in each one, because again, you're a thin dude that's very expressive. You're gonna be able to act through all the makeup that someone's going to put on you.
In this movie, they make his teeth look gross, and he does a lot of like showing the gross teeth.
Yeah, I mean this, this guy's all in. I would say Michelle Bauer and John Durban for the Acting Acting Honors for Demon Warp. They both give it, give it, they're all so he was.
I'm trying to remember who he was in Max Headroom, which I've seen the first couple of episodes of.
A minor character that I think I don't recall the character's name, but it's a play on Dracula. So you've seen Max Headroom episodes more recently than I have, So maybe that brings a bell.
I've thought before that maybe we should do a weird house cinema the pilot of Max Headroom.
Yeah, yeah, I'm all for it, all right, I will not you know, we love to give credit where credit is due for people in monster suits. I couldn't find there's no actual credit for whoever's playing the Sasquatch in one of the extras on the Vinegar Syndrome disc. I think it's mentioned that someone in production's boyfriend played the monster, but they are not, to my knowledge, actually credited all
right special effects on this again. Beeckler did the original monster designs and some of the monster elements that are used in the picture in the end, but Mark Wolf is the special effects lead that's credited. He's credited with special effects work on such films as eighty six is Flight to the Navigator, eighty six is Friday the Thirteenth, Part six Jason Lives, eighty seven, Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, and eighty seven's ish Tar, And then finally the score.
It's another Dan Slider score. We previously mentioned Slider because he also scored the Killer Cat Movie Uninvited. I don't know what do you think about the music here, Joe. I found it forgettable but effective.
Uh. I don't want to be mean, but I think this is one of the funnier musical scores I can recall. I actually I have a note about this, so maybe I'll just go ahead and mention it. I was trying to understand what it was that was making the music funny to me, and I think it's the contrast between the composition and the actual sound of it. The composition is incredibly unsubtle, so it's this heavy, dire, dramatic minor key music. Dun dun duh, you know, uh duh d
d d and uh. So it's that kind of thing. But the electronic instrument voicings that they use do not match the bigness of the music. They sound kind of thin and plinky. So to get the feeling I'm talking about, imagine the most dark, evil sounding music you can, like Night on Bald Mountain to do a callback to Demon Pond, but performed on a series of toy keyboards.
Okay, all right, so we're pretty far away from Tamta on the score.
Yes, yeah, no offense intended to slider, but yes, the music was given me a chuckle.
All right.
Should we talk about the plot.
Let's get into it.
Yeah, well, where could a Bigfoot movie begin but outer space? So we see the Earth, It's floating blue, looks very serene there in the void. And suddenly a little pink object zooms from off screen down into the Earth's atmosphere and it makes a whooshing sound. It comes down through the sky and next we cut to the surface and now we're down on the earth in the mountains of southern California.
Yep. And we're gonna stay there. You're going to see a lot of this landscape.
So this seems to be in the past. I guess it's supposed to be the eighteen hundreds sometime. And we see a priest or a minister wandering through the woods. I originally thought this guy was supposed to be like a Catholic padre, but you said he was credited as minister, so maybe they're thinking he's a Protestant minister.
I don't know who knows what they're thinking, but he's a man of the cloth, seemingly, but as we'll see, like he's ultimately up for whatever. He's flexible, he's flexible, and he's worshiped. Yes.
Yeah, So I'm just going to stick with thinking he's supposed to be a Catholic priest. Maybe that's wrong, but that's what I thought. So he's a priest leading a horse and he's reading aloud from what looks like a paperback Bible. He's reading. I looked up the passage he's reading from, and it is a correct quote of the Bible,
unlike in the Prophecy. He's reading from Deuteronomy chapter twenty eight, and I was gonna originally read this part, but it's a bunch of grandiose threats of cong quoi an annihilation. The main thing I'm gonna mention, because I think it sort of gets referenced again at the end of the book, is the part of the quote he reads that says, and he shall eat the fruit of thy cattle and the fruit of thy land until thou be destroyed. And he shall also not leave thee either corn, wine, or oil.
I think they're going to try to tie this into aliens somehow. It's like, oh, this is not about a this is not about an ancient military conquest. It's about aliens coming to earth.
He shall leave, not corn, not wine, not who hash. Yes.
So later we see this same priest slinking around in the mountains singing Amazing Grace, and it actually kind of made me wonder, like, how popular would that song have been with the Catholic clergy in the year this is supposed to be set. I don't know, But again this is mixed up because maybe it's not actually supposed to be a Catholic priest.
But yeah, maybe he only sings it when he's out alone in the wilderness like this.
It did make me think of an alternate version where you know, they're just thinking on the set, like, what's a religious song we can have him doing, And they got the padre singing Our God is an awesome god.
Anyway.
So he's out there singing with his horse, and out of nowhere a massive object crashes down from the sky and it lands in a ravine up ahead, and then we get a long shot of the priest approaching the object, which is some kind of gray metal ball or disc encased inside this partial crust of rock. And this is the part I mentioned earlier that on the very pixelated version I was watching I did not realize this was supposed to be the thing that fell from the sky.
It just looks like he's going to a boulder. But actually, once you can see the effect, this is not a bad looking mad or whatever.
This is. Yeah, yeah, it looks pretty cool. There's a breakdown on the Vinegar Syndrome disc about how they did this. It's like a perspective model shot with the model and the foreground. Oh yeah, a little bit of cool movie magic here.
Yeah, yeah, looks good. So the priest approaches the site. He's got a crucifix around his neck and he raises it up and he holds it out in front of his face and he mutters, it was a fire. It's the Second Coming, It's the Lord come down to Earth,
and then we cut to the credits. With the credits, are you know they play over panning shots through the woods while that funny music plays, and then oh, I didn't mention this earlier, but for some reason, in the middle of the credits, at one point, there's this big pitch bend or warp in the music, like it's being played on a tape, and suddenly the tape gets stretched or sped up, and I was wondering, could this be
an intentional nod to the demon warp? It must be so, So after the credits we get an establishing shot of a cabin, which will be the central location for the first third of the movie. I'd say, don't look too close at this cabin, because if you do, it starts to seem less remote and cabiny than I think the movie intends.
Like.
The more I was looking at it, I was like, I think that's a paved road running behind it. It looks like it's got all the utilities, and I.
Know, yeah, yeah, we're supposed to be just in the middle of nowhere here, right.
So we cut inside the cabin and we meet Bill Crafton played by George Kennedy and his adult daughter Julie played by Jill Marin, and they're sitting on the floor playing trivial pursuit.
Yeah, big Bill is really slamming those pieces, like the little pie slices or is flying out.
So he has to answer a trivia question. I wonder can listeners get this one who played Lawrence Talbot in the movie The wolf Man? And he thinks for a second, and then at first he thinks it was Lynn Cheney Junior, but then he gets it right. He remembers Lawn and Kennedy is very proud of himself when he nails the answer. He's got a big grin. So the character stuff in this scene is a familiar trope. I'm trying to think,
what is the main movie I remember this from? But it's the goofy, befuddled old dad who can't take care of himself and his adult daughter who sort of becomes his mother. So this is expressed in the movie through wardrobe malfunctions, like the game is interrupted when Julie notices that Bill is missing buttons on his shirt. She offers to sew them back on, but when he goes to get her sewing kitch, he notices that his socks don't match.
Yeah.
Oh, and somehow in the middle of this, he makes these bitter comments about like the wickedness of her mother, who is not present.
Yeah. Yeah, So we get the idea that you know, this is a there's a divorce scenario going on here, and that's one of the reasons that there's nobody to look after Big Bill here, and that's why he said a mess.
He's like, I haven't seen you in so long, thanks to your mother. But then while they're talking about his socks, a sasquatch crashes through the front door.
Yep, broad daylight just does knock either, just bams.
Splinters the door. So it's like, don't even bother locking up, it will do no good. The squash and knocks Bill to the floor. Bill lies there unconscious, and then the sasquatch just kills Julie, so we see her body dragged off with gashes across her face, eyes open. It seems to me like there might have been more tension if the audience thought she might still be alive somewhere. But no, the movie is like, there will be no suspense. Bigfoot killed her.
Yeah, and I guess this is if I'm not understand correctly. The character of Bill here originally had no reason to really be in the picture. He's just old man in the woods hunting Bigfoot, and so they were like, we got to give him more. And so this is considerably more than was originally present, but still there's room for improvement if they had time.
It does feel kind of like added on late. Yeah. Yeah, but one thing we were talking about off Mike is man, this movie gets right to business. I went back and I timed it. It is about ninety to one hundred seconds from the end of the credits until the characters who seem like they're going to be our main characters are attacked by Bigfoot.
Yeah, so it's like Spaceship Bible versus yeah, Bigfoot attack. Yeah.
This is all first five minutes of the movie. And the movie does not let you get a good look at Sasquatch in this scene, but it will also not make you wait very long for that, Like fifteen minutes later you're going to see full Sasquatch.
That's right.
So now we cut to the future and we're going to meet our new five main characters. This is our sasquatchean pin Tad. So there is Carrie and Jack they are a couple. There is Cindy and Fred, they're another couple. And then you've got Tom, who's a loner, a rebel, and these characters. So I alluded to this earlier, and now I wanted to explain a little bit more. They do not initially have a lot of distinctive individual traits,
so it's kind of hard to tell them apart. And this becomes more complicated as the movie goes on because eventually some characteristics do come into focus on occasions, but they're not consistent across different scenes. So it felt almost like the actors were playing well, it's not just there in the acting, it's there in the writing too. It's like the characters were determined by a game of personality roulette that that starts with each scene. So what is
my character like? Are they passive or assertive? Are they kind or cruel? Are they funny or serious? Are they brave or cowardly? Which other characters do they like or dislike? I would say literally all of these traits seem to shift between the five main characters somewhat at random.
Yeah, and again, it's really hard to tell the male characters apart to the point where it's like, I'm really happy when the film starts mutilating them, so I have something to go on. Well, Cook, we're going to carve it down to basically just Jack, and then I'm like, Okay, thank god, there's just one of them to keep track of.
Yeah, So I was trying to pick out which are the more consistent features. Most of the other things are going to kind of shift around, but there are a few things that are somewhat stable. One is that Fred is a kind of preppy jokester. Imagine another Fred character. He's kind of Fred from Scooby Doo, but more of a jerk and kind of a dash of frat boy prankster.
Yeah.
Yeah. And then a consistent thing about Jack is that Jack is haunted. He likes to stare into the distance, but beyond that he is wildly inconsistent, Like, is Jack a brave, sympathetic self sacrificing hero or is he a crazed, selfish lunatic who's kind of a captain ahab or is he just a spaced out weirdo it really he does all of these.
Yeah, it really feels like the direction was and now you're an action hero, so I need you to put on the crazy eyes and start waving as many guns as you can hold it at a time. And this that's another thing about Jack. Jack shoots so many things and so many people and former humans he has. He does not hesitate at all.
There is, in fact, a scene later in the movie when they're out some characters are walking in the woods and like a pine cone falls out of a tree and he just turns and shoots in the general direction of the sound.
Yeah, which I think was done because they're like, he's an action hero, Like we're this is this is action schlog. That's what we need here. But if you analyze it even for a second, he does come off like an unhinged maniac that clearly endangered all of his friends on this mad quest for Squatch.
So but it also doesn't make sense because you could have absorbed the mad quest stuff into the George Kennedy character. Yeah, right, because it makes sense for him to be on a mad quest.
Now, what's why is Jack? What's his backstory? He like saw a bush move in the night once. That's about all we have to go on.
Yeah, it doesn't make sense. The only thing that's really consistent about Tom is that he's supposed to be weird, I think, But the way in which he is weird is extremely variable. Sometimes he's kind of a pathetic, pervy dork. Other times he's kind of a rock and roll rebel. And then at the end of the movie spoiler, he gets killed and then he comes back as a zombie, but as a zombie for some reason, unlike all the other zombies, he can talk and he becomes Jack Nicholson.
Well, we can decide to dice that we can dissect that later, because I think some zombies do get to talk for like administration purposes in the worship of their demon alien overlord. But yeah, I would say that the actor here really comes into his own at this point in the film, playing the speaking zombie. He has that grade line where he's like, I'm I'm ft, but I feel beautiful.
He doesn't just say that, he says it as Jack Nicholson, I'm dead, I feel beautiful Jack. It's great and he doesn't talk like that at all earlier on.
But uh so, I.
Would say of the five of them, Tom, Jack, and Cindy are the most ruelettified of the personalities, and Fred and Carrie feel slightly more stable. But also those last two maybe have less total personality on display at all.
I don't know.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Oh, and it's funny also because sometimes Jack is doing he's doing the haunted thing, looking off off camera in the distance, like what is it, what's you know, what's haunting him? But he's wearing this hat that says Daiwah or Dewa, which is like a fishing brand.
So yeah, I had I was like, what is Dewa daywah or whatever, But yeah, Japanese fishing, an outdoor hobby company.
It's this I don't know, it's just this big logo. It's like imagining somebody being haunted in a hat that has a big Cabella's thing on it, you know. It just I don't know.
The only place he's free is when he's fishing. Yeah.
So they're all heading up the mountain road and this big Chevy Blazer. Fred is driving. Jack is in the passenger seat, Carrie, Cindy and Tom are in the back and on real I didn't catch this the first time, but on rewatch I was like, wait, why are Carrie and Cindy both in the back seat cuddling on Tom and playing with his hair and stuff? That is not congruent with their attitude toward him in later scenes at all Their boyfriends are in the front seat. They I
don't know. It's like, it doesn't make any sense, and I can at this point I can stop noting these types of things because there are too many to list.
Yeah, it's just too inconsistent. But yeah, this is when I first watched it, I was like, I guess it's a truple in the backseat. Yeah, two single guys or a couple in the front. I don't know. Yeah, none of this will be consistent with what we see later on.
They're literally like snuggling him and like playing with his hair.
Yeah.
So the first thing we hear from Tom says, so, Jack, you ever see anything strange up here? Jack says, no, I've heard some things though, I've seen weird shapes moving around here in the night.
Time, great backstory.
Fred says, maybe it was bears. Cindy says, or deer like Bamby, and then she says it with this big grin like it means something like it's a dirty joke or something. But what's the significance of Bamby?
I don't know.
Yeah, does not come up again. Tom explains that these woods are known as the Demon Woods and they have a spooky reputation. He says that quote animals stay away in droves, and then we learn that Jack's uncle, Clem, owns a big part of the Demon Woods, and Jack used to come here camping when he was a kid. Then Clem built a cabin here and started renting it out to people. So I guess that's the cabin that they are headed for right now.
They are ready for the country.
Ready for the country, and it's time to go. So Carrie is like, oh, by the way, remember those people who were attacked when they were on vacation, just like us, And then Tom says these are the woods of hell Jack and Jack screams, no, they're not, and then everybody in the car starts screaming at each other.
They're just having fun. They're just such a fun crew.
Yes, So our heroes arrive at the cabin and they find the front door smashed to pieces. Inside, their stuff all over the floor. Pictures on the wall are hanging a skew. Somebody went through and a scuwed them.
Vacation rentals were different in the eighties. You know, he didn't have like star reviews and so forth on the app. It was you might show up in a bigfoot had ransacked the place.
Yeah, and I feel like there's like a John Candy movie about that or something.
Oh yeah, yeah, the Great Outdoors.
But does this mean that Uncle Clem double booked them with George Kennedy or no.
I think as we'll see later, like George Kennedy had an earlier booking. But George Kennedy has not left the woods for sasquatch revenge purposes. Okay, maybe he just comes back to the cabin to use the restroom. I'm not sure.
Yeah, So jack Jack is like, wow, vandals must have hit this place, kids or something. And there's a good boombox scene where Tom pulls a cassette deck out of the back of the car and he starts playing the rock music on it, and he's dancing, and we notice he's got some really good yanked my cord here. He's got some really good ripped jeans, not just in the knees, but the butcher a rip too. And so we learn that Jack has asked Tom to bring a bunch of
electronic equipment with them. He's got long range listening devices and motion detectors and all kinds of stuff. Jack has also brought a bolt action rifle, which the characters repeatedly referred to as a shotgun. I am no gun expert. I don't know a lot about guns, but I know that's not a shotgun. Tom also has brought a big foot mask. Fred finds it and he decides he wants to use it to scare Cindy, but this gets interrupted when they have their first meeting with Bill crafton So
George Kennedy's outside. He scares everybody by doing a warning shot on his rifle and they come out and he's this big guy standing there in overalls and the yellow hat, and he confronts the gang and tells them that there are bad things in these woods and they need to clear out. But while he's talking to them, Jack sneaks up behind him. Puts a pistol to his head and says, we know all about it, mister. So they take his
gun and the tension sort of comes down. Kennedy introduces himself and tells the story of what happened to him. He doesn't tell the whole story. Actually, he vaguely alludes to something bad having happened, and oh, this is the part where he says, I should have remembered this. He says that it was a few months ago. So then Jack, Then it gets weirder because Jack says, I heard you barely made it out alive. Mister Crafton, why did you come back? It's like, wait, so he knows the story.
Yeah, I guess it's all over the local papers.
So Crafton says, well, there's a thing out here. It took my little girl, and I wasn't prepared to stop it then, but I'm going to stop it now. And he says that They ask why he didn't tell the police. He says he tried to tell them, but they think it was just a wild animal. And then Cindy says, there's no wildlife up here in the woods? Are there woods with no wildlife?
It stays away and drug remember or it's like the you know, the it's like the Wilderness and Alien Covenant. That one also had no wildlife.
Yeah. So he tries to order them to get back in their truck and go home, but they won't listen, so he heads off into the woods. Later that night, there is a scene at the kitchen table where everybody is gathered around and Jack explains to them. This is the part where he reveals that he lured them all out here to the woods on the promise of a weekend to get away, but in reality he wants their help to hunt bigfoot. Everybody has that friend, you.
Know, Yeah, and yeah, everyone loves to be manipulated into a vacation like this.
Yeah, let me take you out to lunch. Actually, you're helping me move.
Yeah. What are the hikes like here? No hikes, just bigfoot tracking.
So he explains that Klem, his uncle who owns this place, has actually disappeared, and Jack has been tracking reports of bigfoot attacks, strange sightings, or other disappearances. Quo, I marked everything, everything, no matter how unbelievable it sounded. And then he unfurls this map that has like five x's on it. Yeah, he's also got a bunch of newspaper clippings and stuff.
Yeah. One of them just says those evil interests, which I was wondering if this might be a weekly column.
I don't know, I wonder if it's a financial column.
But interest rates those evil interests. Yes.
So anyway, the thing is everything points to these woods, and he needs his friends to help him find Uncle Clem and solve the mystery of bigfoot. And so his friends kind of make fun of him for a minute, but then Tom says, you know, Jack, I don't know about any bigfoots, but we're in man. It's like, that's what friends are for. Also in this scene, we have Chekhov's watch alarm. Tom's watch makes a weird little beeping sound and everyone looks at it and they're like, I'm
making a mental note of that. I'll recognize that sound later if I hear it. Another thing I wanted to point out in the scene is that Jack kind of does a reverse She's all that here, So the trope from these high school movies like She's all that is the girl, the nerdy girl with the glasses takes the glasses off and everyone discovers she's cool and beautiful, Jack arrives seeming like a cool hunk, but in this scene he puts glasses on and he becomes a weird nerd
who everybody is making fun of. Did you realize that?
Yeah, that's a good point.
So there are some other general goings on at the cabin that There is a love scene with Jack and Carry which Tom uses the electronic squatch hunting equipment to spy on. There is a gorilla mask prank scene, but it all leads up to the first big squatch attack. So while Fred is locked outside with a gorilla mask, the fog machine flares up and a shadow passes over him.
We know something's about to happen. A hairy thing is creeping into frame and then Fred disappears, so the remaining friends go outside to look for him, but there's no sign of him. They find the car with the hood popped open, and they realize that the engine has been destroyed. So, oh, can't go back home?
Yeah, how can I do this? It's just an animal, right.
Then they retreat inside the house and they put a big board over the front door. But what's the board going to do? It smashed the door to pieces and it just knocks the board in runs inside and starts roaring and kind of saying.
Oh. Now we begin to get to see the Beakler squatch suit in a lot more detail here, And I really loved the look of the sad squatch. Here. You get your standard issue bigfoot body, some really great hands and feet, But then the face of the bigfoot is really nice. It's kind of like snarling evil, a ring atang kind of caveman face, but in a really cool way. I'm really struggling to think of a better savage squatch design.
It's sasquatch, but it has a skull face, deeply sunken eyes, like really, you don't even see eyeballs at all, the sunken eyes or just sockets almost.
Yeah, and especially in the close ups, great manipulation of the lips around these gnarly teeth.
Yeah, but not sharp teeth, human like teeth, but creepy teeth.
Yeah. But he's always like snarling and sneering. This is a squatch with bad intentions.
Yeah. So what does Bigfoot do here? Well, he kills Tom. Later we will see squatch rip people's heads off, but here he doesn't fully rip the head off. He just kind of lifts and twists the head.
Yeah. I mean, he's got the technique down, but I think it's one of those things where it's always like fifty to fifty weather you're going to actually pull the head off, you know.
The main object of Squatch's interest here seems to be Jack's electronic monitoring equipment. So he picks it up and he takes it away with him, and then before he leaves, he has this moment with Jack, like they make eyes at each other. They both stop and look, and Jack's like pointing a gun at Sasquatch, but he can't bring himself to pull the trigger. What's going on?
In some Squatch movies this would have happened because our protagonist comes to see the true gentle or noble Squatch, right, but the demon warp Squatch has no such dimensions. This might be just a senseless moment between these two, but it might loosely connect to something that will happen later. I think maybe that is what they're getting at.
Yeah, I think it's that he Yeah, so it will come up later that these Squatches again, it's invasion of the body Squatchers. So these Squatches are in fact people, and this is a squatch made from a person who Jack actually knows.
Yeah, but are we to imply here that Jack recognizes this person in the squatch? Yeah, surely not.
They all just look like the same squatch. Yeah, there are no traces of the original human form left.
And for the Sasquatches part, he's just glad to make up with some electronic equipment.
I just wanted this circuit board. Yeah. But also here there is a scene of Jack steering into the camera with his face turned down making demon eyes like that shot in the Shining.
Mm hmm, Okay, Yeah, I mean I'm guessing here, but I think they just really wanted him to come off like total action hero mode here, you know, like he's but in a way that ends up making him look like a maniac. Yeah.
I don't know if I buy that explanation on this part, because he just it seems so overtly like he's supposed to look like like psychotic.
Yeah, but for what purpose, Like it doesn't know, what purpose does it serve in the narrative. I think it's just rule of cool yea coming first here.
It would it would make more sense if they're setting it up, setting it up to be that Oh no, Jack is being like hypnotized or possessed to buy Sasquatch in some way.
Yeah, we were going to do like a face turn where oh, savage Squatch is actually noble squatch and humans are the real monster. Yeah, well that would work too, but we're not going on that tretch.
It doesn't do anything. Yeah, so I this never turns into anything. He's just making weird faces at the camera when no one's looking. Yea, and nothing happens with that.
And this is where he falls asleep with guns in each hand, right and yeah.
Yeah, So the next day, now we're entering the middle third of the movie, which is about wandering in the woods. The next day, the car is wrecked. Tom is dead, but his body goes missing, and Fred is missing too, and he was already missing, but now Tom's body has additionally gone missing, and Jack arms carry with a gun and Cindy with a small knife, and Cindy doesn't seem bothered by this.
She's like, Cindy, you good with that knife, and she's like, yeah, I'm ready to go, Like I'm gonna take on a sasquat eight foot tall sas squatch, but I've got a pocket knife.
And she will. There's a scene where she jumps into the front lines against the Sasquatch.
Yeah.
Yeah, but they're gonna hike out of the woods and seek help for They explain the reasons for this, but I didn't understand what they were saying. For whatever reason it is, they're not going to follow the road they drove in on that They're sort of like, there have been sightings of Squatch there, you know that Squatch's road now, so we can't take it.
All, right, fair enough?
Yeah? He also and at this point Jack is concealing from Carrie and Cindy the fact that Tom's body has gone missing. So we also this is where we meet the new characters, you know, the people who show up randomly in the woods about a third of the way through the movie to crank up the body count. We've got a random hiker with a camera. He just keeps
hiking around. We check in with him every now and then, but he's just walking around in the woods until he gets caught in a bear trap and then stabbed in the stomach with a stick by Bigfoot. And also before this, he runs into a zombie, just a human zombie, just.
A zombie wandering through the southern California wilderness. We'll find out more about this soon, but when it happens, you're like, what the Maybe this was another film that was in production just over the horizon.
The other characters we meet are the fun girls Betsy and Tara. They're driving the mountain roads in a jeep blasting classic rock, getting up to no good. They're slamming some cores and Betsy is telling a story about a guy she dated who thought she was asleep in the car on the way home and was picking his nose and she caught him picking his nose and she starts talking about whether his brain was itching. And their plan is to go again to this illegal cannabis grove site,
which they call the Secret Garden. They're going to steal some stuff from there, but when they get there, it's all gone. Somebody took it all already. And then Betsy says, well, we came all this way, might as well get a tan, right, and takes her shirt off. But while they're tanning, they are attacked by sasquatch. Tara gets her head pulled right off and Betsy runs screaming away into the woods and she's going to meet up with our main characters later.
We never find out what happened to the marijuana. Do we think the Sasquatch took the marijuana? Oh?
Maybe, maybe We're going to find out that a certain Asdath was going to take it back to his heavenly abode.
There you go, There you go.
As for the three remaining characters from our original five characters, through the middle of the movie, they do just a lot of walking around and having weird interactions that don't connect to anything else. Like one thing I did want to flag is through this whole stretch of the film, across multiple scenes, Jack keeps holding his rifle in a resting position where it is fully pointed at his friends. And it's not like he's holding them up or something.
They're just not practicing gun safety at all. So like Cindy is walking behind him and he's got the guns slung over his shoulder just pointed at her head. Also, random conflicts and character dynamics arise that did not previously exist and do not continue later. Examples of this are Jack and Cindy at each other's throats, like screaming at each other about stuff. But then also little moments like they're going to kiss.
Yeah, okay, yeah, what possible purpose does that serve? Here?
Hunter, Jack, Cindy, and Carrie find booby traps all over the woods. There are these big steel bear traps and then trip wires rigged with dynamite, and they trace these traps back to a camp site, which is the camp of none other than Bill crafton George Kennedy from earlier. This is the place where there's that standoff scene that's almost a repeat of the first scene where they met, but here Bill has a beeping digital watch and it's like,
wait a minute, remember that sound. That's Tom's watch. So Jack arches Bill into his camp at gunpoint, and they're trying to find out did he kill Tom? But I was just thinking, like, they know he didn't kill Tom. They saw bigfoot kill Tom. Yeah, maybe they think he took Tom's body or something, but I don't know. So Bill just he explains that he found the watch in
the woods, and then he pleads his case. He says that he wants to avenge, avenge his daughter and kill this thing, and that he's been out here for a week. This is the part where he says, I wear this well yellow hat. So it's easier for the thing to see me because I want this fight. Also, somewhere in here, there's a scene where Bigfoot disarms dynamite tripwires, and so that's kind of strange. It's like, wait a minute, Bigfoot has the technological know how to disarm a trigger trap.
Well, we saw him like steal an amp or something earlier. Yeah, there's something going on here.
Bigfoots he's starting a career as a sound guy at the Woods venue. So Bill and Jack here compare notes on Bigfoot. Jack explains that moment of recognition he had with Bigfoot, and also he explains that it stole some of his electronic equipment, and Bill is like, I just have a feeling that killing isn't its only motive. What could this be? But before they can hash it out,
Squatch attacks the camp. Several humans have guns, but for some reason, Cindy runs in to attack it at close range with her three inch knife so they can't shoot at it. Jack and Cindy get knocked out. Carrie shoots at sasquatch. Bill grabs an axe and lures it away from camp like it chases him and eventually it smashes his head. So goodbye, goodbye Bill crafton.
You know, and I was sure, like, this is our lead. I thought, Okay, he's actually just knocked unconscious and he's going to come back at the last minute and help save the day once our main characters get into a jam. But no, no, he's really dead. He's not coming back.
Unfortunately, he's not our lead. Unfortunately Jack is our lead.
Yeah.
Yeah, So Jack wakes up alone in camp. He arms himself with a pistol and some dynamite, and then he leaves and he crosses paths in the woods with Cindy. But she's acting weird. Her back is turned and she's walking strangely, and when he finally catches up to her and turns her around, half of her face is warped. There's your demon warp. It's warped bizarrely, like her eyeball is hanging out of the socket and it's just all
messed up. And then she walks, as if in a trance, into the mouth of a nearby cave and Jack follows, and this goes to the final act. In the cave, this is where things start going off the rails.
Yeah, yeah, this is everything has been entertaining up up up into this point, but now it's going to go into overdrive and we get all these weird elements we've been alluding to when we enter into that cave. And if that cave exterior looks familiar, that's because this movie, like so many films that b movies that shot in southern California, it shot in Bronze and Canyon and those
different caves. This used to be a quarry, and the work there left behind multiple caves and tunnels, caves and tunnels that are just asking for various aliens to crawl in or out of them.
Is this the cave that's in It conquered the world?
Yes, well, I don't know if it's the exact cave. I was comparing photos and I don't know. There are multiple caves there that cave entrances and tunnel entrances that have been used. But yeah, it conquered the world. I think Robot Monster, tons of films.
So this is when all hell breaks loose. So Jack goes into the cave and he's confronted by a bigfoot. He shoots it, but once it is mortally wounded, it starts transforming. Yeah, it's a reverse werewolf transformed where the hair starts kind of sucking in and disappearing, and the skin set. The skin is first bubbling and boiling, and then it settles down and it's a man. Why it's Jack's uncle Clem. Uncle Clem was a sasquatch.
All yeah, And this is again the point where you're just like, what is happening? Where are we going with this movie?
Uncle Clem said, he's sobbing. He says, Jack, I didn't want to hurt you. They made me, they changed me. And then he dies. And then further in the cave we see electronic equipment and dead body parts everywhere. It's a combination slaughterhouse and radio shat.
Yeah it is.
And then further in the cave we get zombies everywhere, tons of them, not bigfoot, just various kinds of shambling undead, many of which are carrying or working on circuit boards and electrical panels.
Yeah, and one of them has what is it other resident shirt? He's got a ban shirt.
Really good, cool, cool classic band tea.
Yeah, I had to look it up. They'll cost you a couple hundred bucks on eBay. What condition though, Oh, I would hope, I mean, you don't want it? And meant right, it's got to be a little little funky. Otherwise, what are you paying for?
I need some oil stains. Yeah. So Jack finds Fred in the cave. Remember Fred, the preppy guy.
Yeah, yeah, I thought he was dead.
He's alive and he's wearing his gorilla mask. He's injured and tied up on the cave floor. Fred tells Jack they've got Carrie inside the craft and he's like, what the craft? What's that? What's he talking about? And Fred says it's this thing, this priest. He wants to use her and another girl, and so Fred tells Jack to go on and get out of here. Jack tries to go inside the craft, which is this metal door behind them in the cave, but he gets blocked at the
door by zombie Tom. Remember this is Tom, the rock and roll radio geek from earlier. Now he's a zombie, but unlike the other zombies, he talks and this is the part where he has turned into Jack Nicholson. So he's like, yeah, Jack, I'm dead, You're still alive. But I feel beautiful, man. You know these are my friends Jack, And he's like.
They're good people and the zombies are just kind of hanging out behind him. And then again the zombies look pretty cool.
What is all this about? I don't know, but so yeah, and then also we see some maintenance going on where the zombies are now working on a spaceship. You see them screwing in greebles to a to a gray spray painted piece of cardboard.
Yeah, yeah, it's like needs more greebels, more greebels.
Here solo cups and yeah, just I don't know, various little dude ads going up on the wall. And here's where we're finally gonna have well, all will be revealed.
What is it.
It's we're gonna go watch a human sacrifice for an alien named Asdrath.
Yes, yeah, and we're meeting our our priest friend the Padre from earlier, except now he is an undead speaking He's an undead priest with the ability to speak, who is serving this alien overlord Asidrath, wearing the black occultist robe. Like we're in just straight up dungeons and dragon's territory at this point. I love it.
So you took him to be a zombie at this point.
I guess so, because he's over one hundred years old.
Now, yeah, I guess I was just thinking he had a magically prolonged life.
But well, maybe maybe that's it, but not prolonged in a very good way. That could be the distinction. Speaking zombies are actually they are, Actually they haven't died all the way yet. Maybe they're just artificially sustained in a very nasty way.
So this guy has the character Betsy tied to the table, and she's going to be a human sacrifice. He's got like the Night, you know, your standard movie human sacrifice. The knife is up and he's chanting. He's saying, as Dreath is Lord, as Dreath is Lord. He's got a whole speech. I'm not going to read the whole thing here, but it's a lot of my master dwells within the sacred chamber. His sacred dagger is raised in trembling, in dissipation.
I think he says that as Dreth. We get from this speech that this guy worships the alien that crashed one hundred years ago and thinks he is an archangel named as Dreth, and he's now this guy's god. And this guy has been helping him repair his spaceship for one hundred years. So that he can finally go back to his heavenly abode.
Yes, yeah, like this the padre here used to love Jesus, but then when a hideous space monster presented itself, he's like close enough, I'll worship this now. And this I really did kind of dig this idea, you know, not in a very deep way, but it's like, yeah, this spaceship crashed one hundred years ago, what kind of repairs could they do? For a long time? You know, they were limited. They had to wait until radio shacks existed, and they had a shot at stealing automobile parts and
what not to get the repairs further along. And who knows they might still only be at like thirty five percent here.
Yeah, they've been trying to get copper all this time.
Yeah.
But so yeah, So he's got Betsy on the table there and he's going to stab her in the heart, cut her heart out, and give it to Azdreth. We'll describe this alien in just a second, and Asdreth's going to be eating it. So but I was confused, like, okay, so is this human sacrifice primarily religious or nutritional in nature? Is that this this alien needs to eat hearts? And so this guy's just going to bring him hearts or is this a ritual for actual religious purposes?
Boy, that's a difficult one. Maybe maybe I is Asterath really divined? Does he like the does he like the religious aspects of this? Or is this more like the Padres thing where he's like, I worship you, and as Dereath is ultimately like, all right, I will allow it, I'll let you this is you really enjoyed this part of it? You know, this is a partnership at this point. I will eat the heart because I want to eat that juicy heart, but I don't really care personally about all of this religious stuff.
Or maybe it's a psychological thing, like maybe for the pre it's like doing the Here comes the airplane to get the baby to eat the food, gets Asdreath ready to eat a heart. He knows he needs to eat the heart, but he's not in the you know, he's not hungry for heart.
Or Asterreth is a true mastermind maybe and he realizes that religion is a great way to control humans. I mean, he also uses zombie magic, but also religion is good.
Okay, so can you describe Asdreth what have we got going on here? With this tremendous puppet.
Oh god, he's great again. This is a Beekler design and you see it through and through. So the main post, the main theatrical poster for the film, also has an illustration of what like the full healthy version of this monster might have looked like. We're essentially talking about a hairless reptilian scorpion tailed biped with a robotic robotic claw hand and kind of a twisted goblin or ony face again like that, you know, classic sort of Beekler monster design.
He also a.
Little bit has the feel of a hairless demon sasquatch, which is gonna be apt considering the bizarro relationship between this creature and the squatches that we've been running into, because it seems that the case is that that scorpion tail stinger that he has, if it stings a human, it will turn them into a sasquatch.
Yes, yeah, so yeah, we actually see that later where Fred he's still alive, but he's gonna end up in the room and he gets poked with this little weird tale that comes out of Asdreth's Asdreth is like it in a big bucket.
Yeah, like a bucket pedestal sort of thing. Basically, he's in bad shape. He's missing one arm completely. The other arm is replaced by a claw. We have no indication that he has like legs anymore. So either he was horrifically injured in the crash or was just previously wounded and debilitated, and you know, it is just left in the state. And I guess can get by because he can command a sasquatch and zombie army to do his bidding.
Yeah, so the stinger turns humans into sasquatches. Yeah and yeah, and it is noted in the Michelle Bauer interview. She's like that stinger that's pretty phallic, isn't it.
But in Astrath does speak, but it's kind of like alien warbling language, and I think the padre translates for him. Yeah.
Yeah, So the priest he cuts out Betsy's heart and feeds it as dreath, and then the priest is going to do the same thing to carry but Jack intervenes. So Jack and Fred both get dragged into the sacrifice room. The priest commands them to kneel in the presence of the archangel Asdreth. He says, our Lord is ready to return to the glory of Heaven, and Jack starts fighting back. He starts like shouting in the priest to saying silence,
but then it turns. It turns into a scuffle. He kills the priest, he shoots the archangel Asdreth, and then he cuts Carrie loose.
Carrie sort of has.
To remind him to free her. He seems a lot more focused on fighting Azdreth.
Yeah, wow, weirdo.
And then Fred and then they're like, come on, Fred, we got to get out of here. You know, we're gonna blow this place up and leave. But Fred has been stung by Asdrath in the fight, and he's like, no, you've got to leave me behind to blow up the ship.
And they're like, because he's squatching out. He's starting to transform.
Yeah, he says, look at me, and he holds up his arms and he's.
Got yeah, yep, he's gonna get in the the werewolf pulsings under the skin, more and more hair growing on the face, and this is pretty exciting, Like he's turning into the squatch. Yeah, even though the alien overlord that created him is presumably all the way dead.
Now, before you taste death, you show no squatch. So on the way out of the cave, Carrie and Jack do leave him behind, and on the way out they also come across Cindy. This is a bizarre moment. Yeah, she's still in a zombie trance and Carrie's like, we've got to help her. But Jack is like, no, she's dead, leave her And Carrie says, no, no, we've got to help her. And then Jack shoots zombie Cindy to convince Carrie to leave her behind.
Yeah, again this kind of grip dark. Yeah, he's just he's just very comfortable shooting humanoids. He does not hesitate it all in a very, I think, either unrealistic or terrifying way.
So they leave the cave and then the cave explodes, big explosion, and then we cut two. Jack wakes up in bed. But I don't know, Rob, can you describe this whole endings? They are like multiple fake out endings and I don't even know if any of them are a real ending.
Yeah, this is confusing. We get yet multiple sort of the nightmare hasn't ended yet sort of endings where he's waking up in bed and carries next to him, but oh, carries a zombie but no, wake up from that. But then doesn't he think? He wakes up from that and Carrie's not even there.
First he wakes up and there he's in bed with Carrie and there are zombies all around the bed. The bed is floating in space.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like a black Garth Maringhi's garage here exactly. Yes.
Yeah, And the zombies attack while Carrie's like, hey, let's go to the beach tomorrow, and the zombies are all getting it. So it's like he sees the zombies and she doesn't. And then he wakes up again and he's in bed again, and then Carrie turns and looks at him and she's she's a zombie now. And then he wakes up again, I think, And is he just by himself?
Then? Yeah, there's no carry So what's real? What's not? Was the whole thing just in his head? No?
Surely it was all a dream?
Surely not. No, It's almost like they're just like, let's try some endings and if they work, they work, and if they don't work, we'll just include all of them. Anyway.
Am I a man who dreamed he was a sasquatch or a sasquatch who dreamed he was a man.
That would have been good if you'd turn into a sasquatch at the end. That would have made it more horrible.
Dream that I had no hair and I lived, and I drove a truck and I was looking for my own kind.
Yeah. Yeah, and I was trying to kill Asdreth instead of serving him. It was really upsetting.
I was gonna say about this movie. I've already made this comparison a little bit, but you know more about
the behind the scenes than I do. The third act of this movie really reminded me a lot of The Dungeon, this other movie we've done on Weird House, in that it felt like a creature makeup effects workshop showcase where they built the plot around We've got all these different masks and sets and props and puppets, and we've been separately working on all these things, and we want to find a story where we can use them all, and this is the movie we got.
I think, so like, you just know that when Beekler shared his idea, He's like, hey, I've got an idea for a movie. He described the third act. He described this showdown in the cave, the rest is just implied, and it'll be a traditional Bigfoot movie up until that point. Yeah, but again, that's I think that's what makest even work so special, that it's just ultimately so unhinged and crazy and ambitious in its use of all these different elements
that you know are stitched away. It has a cohesive lore to it that it's fun to try and fill in the gaps and make it all work and head but yeah, absolutely bonkers and I love it.
Yellow hats off to them, Yes, yes, all right, Well that's all I've got on Demon Warp.
Demon Warp one word. Yeah, I highly recommend it. You pick it up, and you know, physical media form or you know, the high quality stream of it might be available in the future that sometimes comes to pass with these pictures.
Now, wait, Rob, I don't know if this was intentional on your part, but last week we did Demon Pond and this week we're doing Demon Warp. Next week is it Demon Wind?
Oh God, I don't know. Next week is your choice. So it's then the balls in your court to decide if we continue the demon trend. You know, we could eat well on weird house Cinema just doing films for a while that have demon in the title, but we shall see. It was just just happenstance here because I knew that Demon Warp was about to come out in this Blu Ray edition and you happen to pick Demon Pond prior to that. So it's just what the universe wanted from us.
Beautiful coincidence. So for next week, Demon Seed starring Julie Christie, it is maybe not.
I know some people have asked for that one. We'll see.
I don't know about that. I have my doubts about whether I want to watch it.
All right, Well, hey, everybody, just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes in Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. We've been doing Weird House Cinema episodes for what something like five years now. I think we did the math I leave a little yeah, yeah,
something like that. Uh. And if you want to see a full list of all the movies we've covered over the years, go to letterbox dot com. We have a profile there weird House. We have a nice list everything we've covered in the past, and sometimes a peek ahead what's coming out next.
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