DEMON WIND (1990) * ½

I have fond memories of seeing the lenticular video box cover for Demon Wind on video store shelves back in the day.  I always regretted never renting it.  I mean other movies like Uncle Sam and Jack Frost had lenticular VHS boxes, and they were awesome.  There’s no reason Demon Wind shouldn’t follow suit.

As it turns out, it’s mostly terrible.

Cory (Eric Larson) is plagued by bad dreams, so he takes his girlfriend and his seemingly never-ending posse of friends to the shack where his grandparents mysteriously died years earlier.  It looks just like a burnt-out shell, but when they cross the threshold, they find themselves in the house just as it was all those years ago.  One by one, they become possessed by demons and naturally, the only one who can stop them is Cory.  

Demon Wind is a bad Evil Dead rip-off.  It’s overlong, dull, and often doesn’t make a lick of sense.  The kills quickly get repetitive as does the make-up on all the possessed people.  

There are some weird touches here that prevent it from being a total loss.  In one scene, a woman gets turned into a baby doll.  That’s not even the weird part.  The weird part is the others just sort of accept her fate and move on.  

Cory’s gaggle of friends offer some amusement, just for the sheer number of them.  Even as the movie is headed for the third act, his buddies continue to show up to become demon fodder.  My favorites were the two magician friends who irritate the jock asshole of the group by constantly performing magic tricks. 

Demon Wind was the first film by Charles Philip Moore.  He would get much better as he went on to direct the immortal Angel of Destruction four years later.  You can just tell he was itching to direct Kung Fu movies from the random scene where one of the magicians kickboxes a beer can.