Demon Knight (1995) is a little like if the Evil Dead franchise had a surplus of architecture to work with and supernatural beasts with whom to terrorize our human cast of characters. The first cinematic offshoot of HBO’s Tales from the Crypt TV series, the movie takes place in a middle-of-nowhere church turned boarding house in New Mexico; it becomes a hell on Earth for its inhabitants when it becomes grounds for some mystical sparring one evening. A seemingly immortal former soldier, Brayker (William Sadler), arrives at the place carrying a mysterious artifact whose world-altering abilities will be more deeply explained later. On his tail is a powerful demon in a fleshly guise known only as The Collector (Billy Zane), who wants nothing more than to get his hands on the talisman Brayker tightly holds.
In an attempt to wrest the artifact from Brayker, The Collector effectively hexes the property so that its residents can’t leave — a nightmare made worse by his unleashing of a cabal of demons into the building to torment everyone inside, whether in their natural form or through bodily possession. Most will not make it to the end of the movie because of one of those two problems; though we have no doubt, as Brayker does, that a young woman named Jeryline (Jada Pinkett Smith), a scrappy convict employed as a maid at the boarding house as part of a work-release program, will find a way to make it through the night whether she has Brayker helping her or not.
Everything that happens in Demon Knight is cheekily introduced by franchise mascot The Crypt Keeper (John Kassir) in a frame story in which he’s a fed-up horror director deep into the Hollywood game; after that, the movie, though too over-the-top in its violence and too admiring of Zane’s deliciously snaky performance to be called serious, mostly dispenses with the humor The Crypt Keeper provides, opting instead to be an atmospheric, frequently high-octane home invasion-style thriller where liking a character can’t guarantee their survival. Pinkett Smith is a wonderful final girl, transmitting indomitability even when she doesn’t have the upper hand. Zane is a carnivalesque delight as a demon who approaches misdeed with the smart-alecky flourishes of a piece-of-shit stand-up comedian who can nonetheless score laughs amid our distaste.
Demon Knight is good enough that it ought to have brought the start of a successful second chapter for the Tales from the Crypt brand rather than the beginning of a protracted last gasp. The show ended a little more than a year after Demon Knight’s release; follow-up (though narratively unrelated) movies, Bordello of Blood (1996) and Ritual (2002), were respectively released to lukewarm box-office and into anticlimactic direct-to-video purgatory. One wishes the Tales from the Crypt series had gone out on more of a high, though there’s also some symmetry to a crash-and-burn demise of a franchise that so often depicts deaths you’d rather look away from.
Peterson Reviews 