Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight (Film Review)

1995 Universal Pictures
Directed by: Ernest Dickerson; Written by: Mark Bishop, Ethan Reiff, and Cyrus Voris
Starring: Billy Zane, William Sadler, Jada Pinkett, Brenda Bakke, C. C. H. Pounder, and Thomas Haden Church
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 92 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 6/10

A mysterious and frightening man chases another across the desert night. The fleeing man makes his way into a remote boarding house, where he's given a room, and is introduced to the old building's diverse handful of oddball characters...before a knock comes at the door. Turns out the fleeing man has possession of a powerful ancient artifact, and his demonic pursuer will do anything, even kill everyone in the building, to take it.
Ernest Dickerson might not be Steven Spielberg, but he's a solid genre flick director, whose body of work contains 1994's Surviving the Game, released just a year before this flick, Demon Knight. Created to be the first film in what would be a Tales from the Crypt trilogy, Demon Knight takes on the horror-comedy, exploitation tones of the HBO series from which it's spawned. There's plenty of boobs and blood here, and the movie is dumb as hell, but it's also a hell of a lot of fun, and features a surprising amount of atmosphere. William Sadler, most well known as a friendly prisoner in The Shawshank Redemption, as well as Death from the Bill and Ted films, brings his usual quiet charm to this lead role. In the end, though, he and everyone else in this film are just a foil for Billy Zane.
Dickerson, perhaps realizing just how much fun an off the leash Zane can be, and also understanding Demon Knight shouldn't take itself very seriously, allows the cult hero actor to ham it up to his heart's content. Thus, Zane bounces around this film like a Looney Tunes character, tempting each of the boarding house's tenants in sequences that hard cut from the dark, dank boarding house, to silly impressionistic fantasies where Zane exudes nutso gameshow host energy. At the same time, even with all his goofing around, Zane is still quite menacing in the moments where the façade slips, and the evil below the surface peeks out its gnarly, sort of greasy, bat-looking head.
With that said, I don't want to give even the slightest impression that there's any depth below the surface of this film. William Sadler fights Billy Zane, geysers of blood spout toward the camera as limbs are hacked off, and green-eyed demons are repeatedly shot in the head with alarming accuracy by our ever-diminishing squad of good guys. The Crypt Keeper from the TV series bookends the tale with heavy salvos of the most groan-worthy puns ever, and you'll forget most of the flick an hour later. Demon Knight might not reach the horror comedy heights of some of its 90's brethren, like Tremors, Army of Darkness, or The Mummy, but there are a lot worse ways to pass 92 minutes than hanging out with this charming blast of stupidity.