Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Night of the Demons!

Not at all to be confused with last week's classy classic, this Night of the Demons is the 2009 remake of the 80s also-ran best known for popularising goth girls to the horny mind, and is the trashy peak of trashcore. Why the remake? Because the original was also trashy, but this one dials it up to 11, with more gratuitous carnage, sluttier scream queens with ludicrous silicone cans, and a soundtrack of the kind of metal you imagine methheads bang to in tin sheds. The original might have been edgy and hedonistic in its day, but with this one you can taste the spilled beer and feel the sticky floors beneath your feet. If your cinematographic palette pales at Friday the 13th levels of sleaze and gore, feel free to stick to the Universal classic monsters, but if just once a year, as the Christian lore of Halloween entails, you feel the need to let the forces of chaos and debauchery have their day, cry havoc and let spin this brain cell obliterator of a flick.

Come on guys, it'll be fun.

This Night concerns a Halloween party gone ever-so-predictably bad, set in an impressively ominous New Orleans mansion where the silent-movie-pastiche opening sequence informs us demons were once summoned and contained, waiting to rise anew and ruin everyone's festivities.

IDK what "Southern Gothic" is but I think it's this.

Our hapless protagonists are an A-Z of B-C-list scream royalty. Angela, back from the original, is played by Shannon Elizabeth, who was in the unpronounceable remake of Th13rteen Ghosts. Bobbi Sue Luther starred in Laid to Rest, which is only slightly more than you or I have ever done. Monica Keena has the unique distinction of surviving both Jason and Freddy. And Diora Baird was in the prequel to the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (but also South of Heaven, which, if you take anything from this bløg, watch).

May all our T&A queens have that one actually good movie in their filmographies.

In the highest traditions of Plato and Aristotle, our heroines debate the merits of slutty vs scary costumes, mostly settling on the time-honoured cat-ears-and-cleavage formula, to disgusted looks of the I-can't-buh-lieve-she's-wearing-the-same-outfuht? genre.

Sadly this scene does not end with them ripping each other's clothes off and some guy in a Bob Hope costume saying to camera "now that's what I call a catfight".

Meanwhile there's some plot nonsense in which Edward Furlong (rehab) tries to amass enough from street-level dope slinging to pay off an hilarious Bri'ish gangster (Nawlins in this flick is 90% white and the criminal underworld is run by fucking cockneys. I leave it to you to decide who gets to be pissed off at that; I just thought it was funny).

The bartender's Manson costume is a neat detail.

Well one thing leads to another, as things tend to do. Cops raid the party, the stragglers play spin the bottle (everyone in the cast is at least a decade too old for this but who cares), the demons awake but no one notices, and Angela gives us a new rendition of her famous dance, in which she lezzes out with Luther.

Homosexuals will never understand the profound straightness of hot girls kissing.

If anything the movie loses steam as the party shenanigans give way to demons murdering everyone, but the tone remains breezy throughout. Within a line or two of dialogue between Keena and the lead demon, Keena manages to switch from fearful to blasé as though everyone on set just forgot the tone of the scene between takes, but who cares? We know she's going to become an action heroine because she's Monica Keena, she already beat the top two stars of the genre in the same movie, and by that point there's no one else left to be the Final Girl anyway.

A decade and a half of studios trying to force iconic girlboss characters obliterated by a single still of Monica Keena on an average day.

Album review: LIE: The Love And Terror Cult, by Charles Manson

Hey folks it's that time of year again!!! The time when I review an album of music for your listening pleasure. Today's album is a bit of a classic, yet sorely overlooked by the music press due to its singer/songwriter being involved in some interesting side projects. Charlie "Jesus Christ" Manson was a hippy who auditioned for the Monkees and squatted in one of the Beach Boys' houses, before breaking away from show biz to develop his own sound. I used to own his live album too, but I sold it because it sucked balls. It was recorded in a prison and the main instrument was the toilet flushing in the background. But LIE: The Love And Terror Cult, an album released to help fund his trial expenses, is his real artistic statement.

Sadly, Charlie's image was a little too unorthodox for the mainstream charts.

The album starts with "Look At Your Game Girl", which would letter be covered by the Guns and Roses. This sets the standard that will be maintained throughout the artist's oeuvre, in which the lyrics start off coherent and flatten out into a repetitive drawl like something a crazy wall-slapper would say over and over. He then lurches into "Ego", an uptempo meditation on Freudian theory with a nice string break for variety.

In fact there's quite an impressive variety of sounds on this album, though almost all anchored to this cool-ass chunky guitar sound. Charlie's vocals are similarly varied, as he tries on different personae on the various tracks. "Mechanical Man" he sings like a mechanical person of some sort, and relays the sad story of his pet monkey who died, although this may not be entirely autobiographical.

Charlie also lets the Family girls chime in on "I'll Never Say Never To Always", which sounds exactly like the kind of slightly-off nursery rhyme type melody they used to put in horror movies in the 70s, so maybe Charlie invented the trend.

The production is a little rough around the edges, but that's good because it allows Charlie to spread out his ideas, which often seem like sketches and half-finished musings, but are always tuneful and intriguing.

It's a shame Charlie didn't pursue his music more successfully, because you could slip some of this stuff into a playlist of late-60s standards like Buffalo Springfield and Jefferson Airplane and Crackerjack Fuckface* and you'd never know. In a parallel universe somewhere Charlie is remembered as a rock star like Jim Morrison, instead of a crazy-eyed cult leader who cut a guy's ear off and his hangers-on killed people.

9/10 very good album.

*This is not a real band.