Weirdhouse Cinema: Demonwarp

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the epic 1988 sasquatch alien zombie slasher film “Demonwarp,” directed by Emmett Alston, based on a story by John Carl Buechler and starring George Kennedy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
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,

(00:40):
which absolutely does feature a Sasquatch on the rampage in
southern California, but with some delirious added twists and turns
as well.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
Is the Sasquatch movie one of our favorite subgenres.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
I feel like it is for me.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
I think it is in theory, if not in practice.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
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

(01:31):
seem to be a relatively wholesome subgenre of horror. But yeah,
a lot of squatch movies are just gross, dude.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
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,

(02:04):
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

(02:25):
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,

(02:48):
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

(03:11):
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.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
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.

(03:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
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

(04:29):
a lot of slasher movie violence and also at least
top only slasher movie nudity.

Speaker 3 (04:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
Yeah, there's none of that in Demon Warp. Our Squatch
is savage, but he has a has a different agenda
in mind.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yeah, one word, by the way, Demon Warp.

Speaker 3 (05:15):
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.

(05:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (06:09):
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

(06:30):
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

(06:54):
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

(07:15):
is a creature effects showcase. And it is a vehicle
on which to deliver a huge amount of narratively implausible nudity.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
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.

Speaker 3 (07:35):
They don't delay it.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
It does.

Speaker 3 (07:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:47):
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,

(08:11):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
I've seen this cave. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:47):
Also, why are there tombstones on this Do you see
the tombstones? Is there a braveyard in the movie?

Speaker 2 (09:53):
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.

Speaker 3 (10:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (10:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
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.

Speaker 3 (11:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
I think that's as good as we're going to get. Okay,
I think that works.

Speaker 3 (11:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
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

(11:57):
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.

Speaker 3 (12:09):
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

(12:30):
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

(12:53):
a character is approaching it, I did not realize it
was a spaceship because it just looks like a boulder.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
Not just like that, like you are unable to tell
who's talking or whatever, because because the rip is so.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
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

(14:12):
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

(14:33):
Kasugi in that one, and then ninety three's Little Ninja's
also no Kasugi.

Speaker 3 (14:38):
Wait Little Ninja. Oh no wait, I'm thinking of Three Ninjas.
He didn't do Three Ninjas.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
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.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
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

(15:16):
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.

(15:41):
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?

Speaker 2 (15:53):
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

(16:16):
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.

Speaker 3 (16:23):
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

(16:46):
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,

(17:06):
we need to get some more people in here, so
here are some campers. Yeah that it just feels like him.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
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,

(17:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (17:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
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

(18:23):
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.

Speaker 3 (18:47):
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

(19:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
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.

(19:42):
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

(20:05):
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

(20:25):
I think that's other effects folk that contributed to that.
I could be wrong, but I don't think those are Beeler.

Speaker 3 (20:31):
It's a bummer we didn't see the other things. I
want to see that mummy.

Speaker 2 (20:34):
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

(20:58):
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.

(21:20):
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

(21:44):
didn't have any reason to show up, and in general
in general, getting it into shooting shape.

Speaker 3 (21:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
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

(22:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (22:51):
Have you ever tried to write anything on a typewriter though?

Speaker 2 (22:55):
When I was a kid? Yeah, Okay, I've.

Speaker 3 (22:57):
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.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
Can be a good thing. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
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.

Speaker 3 (23:43):
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.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
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,

(24:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (24:46):
Oh I just remembered. Yeah, he is one of the
henchmen of Wall Street Walter, Yeah, Uninvited.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
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.

Speaker 3 (25:08):
He comes with gear.

Speaker 2 (25:09):
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.

(25:31):
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.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
Wait, is the yellow cap in the script then?

Speaker 2 (25:48):
Or was that?

Speaker 1 (25:48):
No?

Speaker 2 (25:48):
He brought that that was his thing.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
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?

Speaker 1 (26:12):
Like?

Speaker 2 (26:12):
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

(26:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (26:44):
The first twenty minute, the first five.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (27:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (27:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
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.

Speaker 3 (29:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (29:33):
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.

(29:53):
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

(30:15):
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

(30:37):
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.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
I thought that was that's a cool transition, going from
the Bigfoot movies to the literary journals.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
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,

(31:14):
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

(31:36):
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?

Speaker 3 (31:48):
Okay, are we gonna have to go back and do
beast Master one even though we've already done two.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:00):
Wait oh it was wings Hauser and.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
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

(32:25):
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

(32:46):
various Buck Cherry music videos.

Speaker 3 (32:49):
It seems, Oh, did he do the one for I
Love the Cocaine.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
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

(33:13):
player is a huge Sasquatch enthusiast. So I don't know
the conspiracy widens.

Speaker 3 (33:18):
How did you find? Were you just googling the band
members plus Sasquatch?

Speaker 2 (33:22):
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

(33:45):
the Bell Murder. She wrote Fraser Silk stalkings, er and heroes.

Speaker 3 (33:49):
I'm just mad they didn't give this guy an ascot.

Speaker 2 (33:53):
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.

Speaker 3 (34:15):
So those are our main five, but they're not the
only characters who show up.

Speaker 2 (34:20):
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,

(34:41):
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.

Speaker 3 (35:03):
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

(35:24):
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.

(35:44):
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

(36:06):
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

(36:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
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

(37:04):
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.

Speaker 3 (37:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
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.

Speaker 3 (37:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
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

(38:20):
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

(38:43):
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

(39:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:22):
In this movie, they make his teeth look gross, and
he does a lot of like showing the gross teeth.

Speaker 2 (39:27):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:40):
I'm trying to remember who he was in Max Headroom,
which I've seen the first couple of episodes of.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:56):
I've thought before that maybe we should do a weird
house cinema the pilot of Max Headroom.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
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

(40:25):
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,

(40:45):
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.

Speaker 3 (41:07):
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

(41:30):
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

(41:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
Okay, all right, so we're pretty far away from Tamta
on the score.

Speaker 3 (42:10):
Yes, yeah, no offense intended to slider, but yes, the
music was given me a chuckle.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
All right.

Speaker 3 (42:27):
Should we talk about the plot.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
Let's get into it.

Speaker 3 (42:30):
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

(42:52):
now we're down on the earth in the mountains of
southern California.

Speaker 2 (42:56):
Yep. And we're gonna stay there. You're going to see
a lot of this landscape.

Speaker 3 (43:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (43:31):
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,

(43:54):
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.

(44:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
He shall leave, not corn, not wine, not who hash. Yes.

Speaker 3 (44:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:56):
But yeah, maybe he only sings it when he's out
alone in the wilderness like this.

Speaker 3 (45:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
Anyway.

Speaker 3 (45:12):
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

(45:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
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.

Speaker 3 (46:02):
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

(46:23):
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

(46:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
Like.

Speaker 3 (47:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
Know, yeah, yeah, we're supposed to be just in the
middle of nowhere here, right.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:27):
Yeah, big Bill is really slamming those pieces, like the
little pie slices or is flying out.

Speaker 3 (47:34):
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

(47:56):
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

(48:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (48:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:30):
Oh, and somehow in the middle of this, he makes
these bitter comments about like the wickedness of her mother,
who is not present.

Speaker 2 (48:37):
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.

Speaker 3 (48:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (48:56):
Yep, broad daylight just does knock either, just bams.

Speaker 3 (49:02):
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

(49:23):
the audience thought she might still be alive somewhere. But no,
the movie is like, there will be no suspense. Bigfoot
killed her.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
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.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
Yeah, so it's like Spaceship Bible versus yeah, Bigfoot attack. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (50:32):
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

(50:53):
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

(51:13):
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

(51:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
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.

Speaker 3 (52:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:31):
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

(52:53):
he just a spaced out weirdo it really he does
all of these.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
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.

Speaker 3 (53:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (53:28):
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.

Speaker 3 (53:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (53:58):
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.

Speaker 3 (54:05):
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.

(54:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
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

(55:01):
feel beautiful.

Speaker 3 (55:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
But uh so, I.

Speaker 3 (55:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:36):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (55:38):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:56):
So yeah, I had I was like, what is Dewa
daywah or whatever, But yeah, Japanese fishing, an outdoor hobby company.

Speaker 3 (56:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (56:15):
The only place he's free is when he's fishing. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (56:18):
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

(56:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (56:57):
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.

Speaker 3 (57:09):
They're literally like snuggling him and like playing with his hair.

Speaker 2 (57:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (57:26):
Time, great backstory.

Speaker 3 (57:29):
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?

Speaker 2 (57:43):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (57:44):
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.

(58:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (58:13):
They are ready for the country.

Speaker 3 (58:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
They're just having fun. They're just such a fun crew.

Speaker 3 (58:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (58:58):
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.

Speaker 3 (59:09):
Yeah, and I feel like there's like a John Candy
movie about that or something.

Speaker 2 (59:12):
Oh yeah, yeah, the Great Outdoors.

Speaker 3 (59:14):
But does this mean that Uncle Clem double booked them
with George Kennedy or no.

Speaker 2 (59:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (59:36):
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,

(59:59):
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.

(01:00:20):
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

(01:00:41):
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

(01:01:02):
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,

(01:01:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:01:34):
Yeah, I guess it's all over the local papers.

Speaker 3 (01:01:36):
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

(01:01:57):
woods with no wildlife?

Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:02:07):
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

(01:02:29):
help to hunt bigfoot. Everybody has that friend, you.

Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
Know, Yeah, and yeah, everyone loves to be manipulated into
a vacation like this.

Speaker 3 (01:02:39):
Yeah, let me take you out to lunch. Actually, you're
helping me move.

Speaker 2 (01:02:42):
Yeah. What are the hikes like here? No hikes, just
bigfoot tracking.

Speaker 3 (01:02:47):
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,

(01:03:11):
he's also got a bunch of newspaper clippings and stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
Yeah. One of them just says those evil interests, which
I was wondering if this might be a weekly column.

Speaker 3 (01:03:18):
I don't know, I wonder if it's a financial column.

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
But interest rates those evil interests. Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:03:25):
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

(01:03:45):
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

(01:04:08):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:04:28):
Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 3 (01:04:31):
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.

(01:04:55):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:05:13):
Yeah, how can I do this? It's just an animal, right.

Speaker 3 (01:05:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:05:29):
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

(01:05:49):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:06:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
Yeah, and especially in the close ups, great manipulation of
the lips around these gnarly teeth.

Speaker 3 (01:06:16):
Yeah, but not sharp teeth, human like teeth, but creepy teeth.

Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
Yeah. But he's always like snarling and sneering. This is
a squatch with bad intentions.

Speaker 3 (01:06:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:06:39):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:06:47):
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

(01:07:07):
himself to pull the trigger. What's going on?

Speaker 2 (01:07:11):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:07:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
Yeah, but are we to imply here that Jack recognizes
this person in the squatch? Yeah, surely not.

Speaker 3 (01:07:51):
They all just look like the same squatch. Yeah, there
are no traces of the original human form left.

Speaker 2 (01:07:58):
And for the Sasquatches part, he's just glad to make
up with some electronic equipment.

Speaker 3 (01:08:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:08:15):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:08:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:08:39):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:08:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:08:59):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:09:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:09:18):
And this is where he falls asleep with guns in
each hand, right and yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:09:22):
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

(01:09:43):
and Cindy with a small knife, and Cindy doesn't seem
bothered by this.

Speaker 2 (01:09:48):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:09:57):
And she will. There's a scene where she jumps into
the front lines against the Sasquatch.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:10:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:10:22):
All, right, fair enough?

Speaker 3 (01:10:23):
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

(01:10:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:11:00):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:11:15):
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

(01:11:36):
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,

(01:11:57):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:12:10):
We never find out what happened to the marijuana. Do
we think the Sasquatch took the marijuana? Oh?

Speaker 3 (01:12:16):
Maybe, maybe We're going to find out that a certain
Asdath was going to take it back to his heavenly abode.

Speaker 2 (01:12:22):
There you go, There you go.

Speaker 3 (01:12:25):
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

(01:12:46):
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

(01:13:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:13:21):
Yeah, okay, yeah, what possible purpose does that serve? Here?

Speaker 3 (01:13:25):
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

(01:13:47):
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.

(01:14:08):
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.

(01:14:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:14:47):
Well, we saw him like steal an amp or something earlier. Yeah,
there's something going on here.

Speaker 3 (01:14:54):
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

(01:15:15):
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

(01:15:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:15:46):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:16:00):
Unfortunately, he's not our lead. Unfortunately Jack is our lead.

Speaker 2 (01:16:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:16:04):
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

(01:16:28):
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,

(01:16:49):
and this goes to the final act. In the cave,
this is where things start going off the rails.

Speaker 2 (01:16:56):
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

(01:17:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:17:30):
Is this the cave that's in It conquered the world?

Speaker 2 (01:17:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:17:47):
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

(01:18:10):
Jack's uncle Clem. Uncle Clem was a sasquatch.

Speaker 2 (01:18:13):
All yeah, And this is again the point where you're
just like, what is happening? Where are we going with
this movie?

Speaker 3 (01:18:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:18:37):
Yeah it is.

Speaker 3 (01:18:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:18:52):
Yeah, and one of them has what is it other
resident shirt? He's got a ban shirt.

Speaker 3 (01:18:56):
Really good, cool, cool classic band tea.

Speaker 2 (01:18:59):
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?

Speaker 3 (01:19:10):
I need some oil stains. Yeah. So Jack finds Fred
in the cave. Remember Fred, the preppy guy.

Speaker 2 (01:19:17):
Yeah, yeah, I thought he was dead.

Speaker 3 (01:19:19):
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

(01:19:39):
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

(01:20:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:20:13):
They're good people and the zombies are just kind of
hanging out behind him. And then again the zombies look
pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (01:20:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:20:38):
Yeah, yeah, it's like needs more greebels, more greebels.

Speaker 3 (01:20:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:20:53):
What is it.

Speaker 3 (01:20:54):
It's we're gonna go watch a human sacrifice for an
alien named Asdrath.

Speaker 2 (01:20:59):
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

(01:21:21):
at this point. I love it.

Speaker 3 (01:21:22):
So you took him to be a zombie at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:21:25):
I guess so, because he's over one hundred years old.

Speaker 3 (01:21:28):
Now, yeah, I guess I was just thinking he had
a magically prolonged life.

Speaker 2 (01:21:32):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:21:50):
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

(01:22:11):
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

(01:22:35):
one hundred years. So that he can finally go back
to his heavenly abode.

Speaker 2 (01:22:39):
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

(01:23:01):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:23:15):
Yeah, they've been trying to get copper all this time.

Speaker 2 (01:23:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:23:20):
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

(01:23:41):
so this guy's just going to bring him hearts or
is this a ritual for actual religious purposes?

Speaker 2 (01:23:49):
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.

(01:24:13):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:24:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:24:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:24:46):
Okay, so can you describe Asdreth what have we got
going on here? With this tremendous puppet.

Speaker 2 (01:24:51):
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

(01:25:15):
hand and kind of a twisted goblin or ony face
again like that, you know, classic sort of Beekler monster design.

Speaker 3 (01:25:24):
He also a.

Speaker 2 (01:25:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:25:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:26:01):
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

(01:26:24):
the state. And I guess can get by because he
can command a sasquatch and zombie army to do his bidding.

Speaker 3 (01:26:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:26:44):
But in Astrath does speak, but it's kind of like
alien warbling language, and I think the padre translates for him. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:26:53):
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

(01:27:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:27:32):
Carrie sort of has.

Speaker 3 (01:27:32):
To remind him to free her. He seems a lot
more focused on fighting Azdreth.

Speaker 2 (01:27:37):
Yeah, wow, weirdo.

Speaker 3 (01:27:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:27:53):
And they're like, because he's squatching out. He's starting to transform.

Speaker 3 (01:27:56):
Yeah, he says, look at me, and he holds up
his arms and he's.

Speaker 2 (01:27:59):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:28:17):
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

(01:28:38):
help her. And then Jack shoots zombie Cindy to convince
Carrie to leave her behind.

Speaker 2 (01:28:43):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:28:58):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:29:17):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:29:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:29:41):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like a black Garth Maringhi's garage here exactly. Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:29:47):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:30:06):
Then? Yeah, there's no carry So what's real? What's not?
Was the whole thing just in his head? No?

Speaker 3 (01:30:13):
Surely it was all a dream?

Speaker 2 (01:30:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:30:25):
Am I a man who dreamed he was a sasquatch
or a sasquatch who dreamed he was a man.

Speaker 2 (01:30:30):
That would have been good if you'd turn into a
sasquatch at the end. That would have made it more horrible.

Speaker 3 (01:30:35):
Dream that I had no hair and I lived, and
I drove a truck and I was looking for my
own kind.

Speaker 2 (01:30:41):
Yeah. Yeah, and I was trying to kill Asdreth instead
of serving him. It was really upsetting.

Speaker 3 (01:30:47):
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

(01:31:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:31:23):
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

(01:31:46):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:32:03):
Yellow hats off to them, Yes, yes, all right, Well
that's all I've got on Demon Warp.

Speaker 2 (01:32:09):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:32:22):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:32:32):
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

(01:32:54):
this Blu Ray edition and you happen to pick Demon
Pond prior to that. So it's just what the universe
wanted from us.

Speaker 3 (01:33:01):
Beautiful coincidence. So for next week, Demon Seed starring Julie Christie,
it is maybe not.

Speaker 2 (01:33:09):
I know some people have asked for that one. We'll see.

Speaker 3 (01:33:11):
I don't know about that. I have my doubts about
whether I want to watch it.

Speaker 2 (01:33:16):
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.

(01:33:37):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:33:55):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you'd like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:34:16):
Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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