Demon Haunt (2009) - 2/4

You've all heard me talk about it for the last year, you've seen me post this trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOiHMho6Muk countless times, and now the moment has finally arrived: I, like Moses, have ascended the mountain of Demon Haunt and I return to bring you, etched in stone tablets, my review.

Demon Haunt is about a woman (lovely blond, Olivia Dunkley), who just lost her husband in a car crash that also left her sister paralyzed from the waist down, moving into a house that happens to be haunted by a demon. No-one knows why the demon is there, not even Mikels, because we're never told. But I suspect a computer did it. After a particularly startling incident, blondie surfs the web and finds the name of a paranormal investigator (Sean Morelli) who specializes in 'house cleansing.' This investigator, Raymond LaCleur, is actually a down and out exorcist, which is a new concept to me; he just sits around the house and lives like a slob. A real disgrace to all exorcists. He has to find the courage and faith to take up his strange voodoo cylinder thing and fight the good fight against demon-kind once more.

With that plot in place, the film plays out exactly as you would imagine. There is quite a bit of focus on the reticence and emotional issues for LaCleur, his disputes with his exorcist father (who is a Catholic priest), and the love-hate banter with his eye-liner wearing pal. Of course he ultimately decides to help these women and there's a climactic show-down.

That's pretty mainstream, much more mainstream than I'm accustomed to from Mikels. In the meanwhile, some Mikels-esque things happen that don't affect the plot at all. Like scenes at a mannequin-filled museum involving his long-time wife Shanti as some sort of keynote speaker who needs a gaudy costume and Mikels himself as a tourist snapping photos in the museum. There's also a weird neighbour, Hank, equal part Archie Bunker and Hank Hill, who is sure the girls next door are satanists. He provides comic relief, by saying things like, "I don't throw around no suppositories." Malapropisms are always worth a laugh. I was more than a little surprised to find this comic relief actually comic. I found myself laughing quite a bit at Hank and his shrewish wife (Beverly Washburn, from Spider Baby!).

The demons are, of course, CGI. Particularly primitive CGI. As we all know, Mikels has a low budget and uses what scant resources he has. These demons were created on a home computer. They're kind of goofy-looking. As we also know, Mikels has never allowed a low budget to stop him from doing things even major studios would find intimidating. He doesn't shy away from having his exorcists shoot psychic beams from their hands, demons crash through (CGI) floors, skeletal spirits, hordes of demon imps, tentacled masses, portals to hell, hellish landscapes, and all that good stuff. I have to admire his ambition, even if the resulting images are sometimes wonky (see the car crash in the trailer above).

So that's the long-anticipated Demon Haunt. It wasn't as strange and ridiculous as the trailer led me to believe. If anything, it's too normal. The Corpse Grinders 2, for which I've been developing a delayed affection, was thoroughly odd. With Demon Haunt, Mikels chose to focus on his characters, particularly Raymond, and his development as a person, which doesn't work so well in a film of this sort. It's hard to have CGI imps shooting CGI lightening in one scene, then a heartfelt father-son argument in the next. I would have preferred more epic battles with the CGI.

Bonus points for:
Gratuitous duck-feeding
Calling a paraplegic a 'cripple'
Gratuitous eye-liner on two men
Utterly camp fashion designer
Dubbed "Oof" and "Ouch" when a girl flies from the window in a car crash
Pointless opening shots of old ladies at a graveyard
Demons soaring over the seaside in broad daylight like gulls