Demonwarp (1988)

Episode 446, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: Alright. We are gonna get going today with a, I think, obscure horror film from the eighties. This is a movie that I selected. It’s been bouncing around on a list of mine for a while. I see it brought up every now and then, and I’ve always been curious about it because it’s a little more obscure.

I don’t remember seeing the box art for this on the video store shelves, or if I did it, I don’t know. It’s just kind of passed me by, but here we are. I think that the most interesting thing about it initially going in is the fact that it stars one of our favorite actors who’s always in these movies.

George, I’ll do anything for Aze Kennedy. Yeah, and this is 1980 eight’s Demon Warp, and it has a really interesting story behind it. 

Craig: I had never heard of it. I don’t know. I think it just must have been fairly obscure. ’cause this seems like the kind of movie that I probably would have rented, 

Todd: right? Yeah, 

Craig: based on the box art.

Now I’ve seen lots of different box art, but I think the most. Popular one has what looks very much like a Bigfoot on it. And, uh, I don’t know, demon Warp is a great name. That alone I probably would’ve been intrigued by, but no, I, I don’t recall ever having heard of it. It’s really not streaming anywhere.

It’s, it’s difficult to find. Yeah. 

Todd: It is surprisingly, 

Craig: I think we found it on YouTube, but you sent me a link to it. I don’t know if you had to dive deep for it. ’cause when I just looked for it on YouTube myself, I just found stuff about it. I had to follow your link to get to it, but it is there and the quality is okay.

I, I have a feeling that the original quality probably isn’t great, but it’s, it’s interesting. 

Todd: Yeah, it sure is. This is the 1988, so this is right in the middle of the video boom. And the genesis of this project was, it was, uh, something that Vidmark put together, Vidmark, which later became TriMark, um, was a video, uh, distributor.

And as we’ve talked about on previous episodes and with different movies that we’ve discussed, this was a time where you could make almost anything and instantly get distribution for it because the video rental market was so hungry for films, especially genre films that they were buying anything. And so it was kind of a golden age.

And you’ve got people like Charles Band and Fred Oland Ray out there producing stuff. Specifically to tap into this market, Vidmark decided they were gonna try to get in on to producing films that they had been previously only distributing, and this is one of their earliest ones. And I think that the history behind it is really interesting because it was originally a script by.

John Carl Buckler, who we’ve talked about a number of times on this podcast as recently as Giess, right? Mm-hmm. He was the special effects artist, a creature artist behind, uh, Giess, your favorite film troll. Mm-hmm. The Garbage Male Kids movies, a whole bunch of stuff Charles band put out. And, uh, he was originally slated to direct it as well, so he wrote this script and he was slated to direct it, and Jack Palas of all people was slated to star in it.

And Jack Palas bowed out because he decided, you know what? I’m not gonna make these kind of movies anymore. John Buckler got pulled away to do Friday the 13th, part seven, right? Much, much bigger project with a much, much bigger budget. You can’t blame him for that. But he left behind a few creature designs.

He had made a Bigfoot type monster, an alien type monster, a mummy type monster puppet that was intended to be used in the film and apparently also left behind a script that was absolutely a mess. And so it was kind of rescued by the producer Richard Albert, who was actually the head of a very, very famous and extremely successful advertising company for all the major studios put together advertising campaigns for tons of movies for these studios.

And, uh, he just sicked two of his copywriters on this. And in between, you know, them setting up poster art and, and writing ad copy and all that stuff, they managed to take his script and bang out different one that wrote around the now limited budget that they now had for the movie. And these. Creature designs that they had for the movie.

Basically, you know, writing for what you now have available to you, which is a smart thing to do. And these two guys who had no previous experience writing a movie put together this thing and got quite a few names in it, besides George Kennedy. I was kind of surprised at the people who ended up popping up on the screen.

Craig: Yeah, I know you’re gonna tell me about at least one of these ladies. What 

Todd: makes you say that? Because 

Craig: I, I don’t know, I was reading, you know, some review or, or something and it mentions this lady’s name who, and I think all the girls in this, women in this movie. Take their tops off at some point, which is great.

Love it. But there was one actress in particular that this reviewer was excited about, so I’m sure there’s some connection to her. The only other person, you know, they all kinda looked like typical. It’s the typical group of teenagers. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: And I, I feel like it’s also f