Demon Possessed

Demon Possessed is a movie which embodies exactly the kind of quality I have come to expect from its makers, Action International Pictures. ::sneer:: That is not to say that I was not entertained by it, and I suppose that is all I can ask.

The film follows a day and a night in the lives of six very stupid snowmobilers who race across a frozen lake only to meet with an accident in the form of a tree. The tree just jumped right the fuck out in front of one of them, obviously. They take shelter in the only available structure, an abandoned camp for children which used to be run by Dominicans but now is home to a demon. As the title would suggest, one of the characters then gets possessed. Ta da!

But that's not the beginning. The story starts with one of the worst voice-overs I've ever heard, performed by a woman who sounds like Kathleen Turner after smoking a whole carton of cigarettes in one sitting. We gather that she is the future self of one of the characters, Jeannie (Dawn Laurrie with two r's). Future old Jeannie muses about the day her childhood ended (the day the movie happens in) and why her boyfriend Tom (Aaron Kjenaas with four a's), a handsome [sic] college boy, even bothered to propose to little old her. The voiceover's reasoning is that he proposed because his sister Karen (Connie Snyder) was going to get married to a med student named Chris (David Fields) and that Tom's best friend Ron (Jim Cagle) was engaged to a black girl (Lissa, played by Eve Montgomery). They had to throw it in that Lissa was black. I know I get engaged to someone not suited for me every time someone I know decides to marry a black person. This gets awkward, since I've been married for three years, but we gotta do what's expected in this world.

That's not the end of the racist comments. The first dialogue not spoken by future Jeannie is a bunch of racist crap out of a guy in the bar where they stop to drink beer before Tom runs into a tree and then gets demon possessed. Then Ron hears Lissa singing and complains that he's engaged to the only black girl who can't sing. Later, demon Tom taunts Lissa by saying that Ron (who is now dead, having clotheslined himself on barbed wire racing for help on his snowmobile in the dark but they don't know that except for demon Tom) is probably back at the bar snuggled up with some "hot blonde babe."

But the hatefulness doesn't end there. Before the tree and the barbed wire, back at the bar, Karen goes to get a map to the lake from the bar's owner and her brother Tom follows her and starts rubbing her butt slowly and seductively (as well as a bit absentmindedly, as if rubbing his sister's butt is just his regular thing). Jeannie and Chris see this, and nothing else is ever said about it, even when demon Tom is later fucking Jeannie in the ass and imagining she is Karen.

So, anyway, they get to the cabin with half-dead Tom, the rest of them play with a weird Ouija board that has a spinner and an eyeball, Tom gets possessed and magically heals, kills everyone but Jeannie, fucks the hell out of her, she escapes, Ron's reanimated corpse chases her, as she mentioned in one of her many voiceovers she can drive a sled better than any of them so she gets away, then she does a final voiceover telling us that she never tried to explain to the sheriff what happened and twenty years later she went back and the camp was burned down the end. Worst voiceover ever, right? It taunted me by its very existence, thinking it was added in post so that the movie would make sense, but the voiceover just raised more questions instead of paving over the holes. I was hoping for a demon baby or a demon Jeannie or more black people from the future, something, but all I got was Jeannie's admission that by playing with the Ouija board that she on some level wanted it to happen.

Excuse me, but I used to play with a Ouija board all the time in middle school, and I never wanted anyone to get an icicle in the eye or hanged with old undeveloped film or cut up by a ceiling fan; nor did I hope for a man to be clotheslined by barbed wire, reanimated, run over with a bulldozer and then burned up. However, if I had seen this movie at the time (impossible, I was in college when it came out but just go with it) I'm sure I would have wished for all those things to happen to these characters. And so would my future hag-voiced self.

P.S. The woman on that poster up top was nowhere near this film.