DVD REVIEW: DEMON HUNTER

The Pitch

“It’s kind of like Constantine, but to make up for the lack of budget, special effects, a decent story and good acting, we’ll throw in lots and lots of boobies!”

The Humans

Billy Drago, Sean Patrick Flannery, Colleen Porch, Nancy Yoon, Tanya Deighton

A rogue angel comes to Earth looking to procreate. He inseminates various local girls, but the church is quick to jump in and exorcise the victims, making sure the pregnancies don’t come to full term. However, when the exorcism fails, they have to call in the Demon Hunter. He kind of hacks and slashes his way to salvation. Oh, and he just so happens to have been born from one of these unholy demonic romps.

The Package

The cover-art is nice, if not a little misleading. There’s a black skyline framed by an orange sunset that looks really nice, but the skyline looks European…like Rome or somewhere similar, and this movie takes place in LA. There’s also a pair of eyes at the bottom, but they would have been better left off.

In the Features menu you can choose an incredibly boring feature commentary with writer Mitchell Gould and actress Nancy Yoon. Yoon is excited to be there but she spends the majority of the running time kissing Gould’s ass and you can tell it makes him a little self-conscious. It’s really uncomfortable to listen to. There’s also a making-of documentary that features the two main female performers (Yoon, again just wants to kiss everyone’s ass while Colleen Porch, who has nothing more prominent on her resume than a couple of background characters on CSI, talks like she’s Julia Roberts or some other high-profile Hollywood Actress – the ego on this chick is HUGE), Gould (only interesting person), Producer Steven J. Cannell (talking head) and director Scott Ziehl, who seemed unable to talk about anything but the sex scenes. Gould’s stuff was good as he talked about the differences between the script and the actual movie, the production troubles and the action stuff. The rest were just a chore to even look at, let alone listen to.

Demons seem to be a pretty popular film subject. Bill Paxton’s dealt with them, as has Keanu, Laura Linney (although those were alleged demons), Linda Blair and now Sean Ptrick Flannery. The only difference between those films and this one is that they were good. Demon Hunter is not.

Flannery stars as Jake, a human/demon hybrid that works for the church hunting down rogue angels bent on impregnating earthly females for the purpose of baring a little hellion of their own. The angel this time around is Asmodeus (Drago), a creepy old guy who slinks around like he’s Prince on ecstasy. For some reason, the church decides that Asmodeus may be a little much for our hero to handle so they send Sister Sara (Porch) to tag along with him, making sure he’s still playing for the right team (he is half demon after all). Throw in a succubus (Deighton – with the worst-looking prosthetic horns I have ever seen) who’s hell-bent (pun!) on seducing our guy and the possessed mother-to-be of Asmodeus’ bundle of joy and you’ve got a cast. Normally I would end that sentence with “you’ve got a nice selection of characters,” but characterization is something that was lost on our crew. Flannery is the generic tortured soul, fighting for salvation from a God who rejected him, Porch stumbles around as the sweet little Nun who’s in over her head and tries to relegate the entire situation into her narrow-minded faith and Yoon thinks playing possessed means squinting your eyes and hissing a lot.

So for 78 minutes our motley crew stumbles and bumbles around Los Angeles, getting into altercations, having sex, killing demons, questioning existence, waxing philosophical on humanity, having sex, reciting the same vapid, generic dialogue you’ve come to expect from a movie like this and oh, did I mention sex? Yeah – there’s a lot of it. Nowhere near the debauchery of say, Hostel, but definitely worthy of a midnight showing on Cinemax and to that degree, really out of place in this movie. It’s almost like the director couldn’t focus on the rest of the movie because he was way too anxious to get to the next scene involving breasts.

Ah well, at least there’s nudity. That’s worth something.