Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #141 Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and disgraced former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

Between this website, parenting, The Weird Accordion to Al and freelancing, I generally do not have time to watch anything that I do not write about, with the exception, of course, of television shows and movies I watch with my wife and children. 

At this stage in my life and career the concept of watching for pleasure doesn’t really exist for me. If I take the time to watch a movie or TV show by myself, it’s almost invariably to feed the insatiable beast that is the insanely demanding Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place production schedule. 

Even when I set out to watch something for pleasure rather than business I usually end up writing about it all the same. I’m compulsive that way. But in the rare instance that I do find myself in front of a television without my family watching something I do not need to write about imminently I usually treat myself to an old episode of Tales from the Crypt or its animated kiddie spin-off Tales from the Crypt-Keeper. 

That’s right. I watch a children’s cartoon even though I am, in some ways, a grown up. Don’t judge me. Now at this point you might be saying, “Hey, don’t you have a column where you write about every episode of Tales from the Crypt? Isn’t that still work?” 

You’re right in that I do have a column called Spookthology of Terror where I write about every episode of Tales From the Crypt but when I am all by myself and watching something for pleasure I choose episodes from seasons I haven’t gotten to yet. 

That’s right: I’m a rebel.

Particularly during the pandemic, Tales From the Crypt is my television comfort food. Nothing seems to relax me and take my mind off the horrors of real life quite like watching terrible people suffer horribly.

So I leaped at the opportunity to re-watch the 1995 Tales From the Crypt feature film Demon Knight for this column even though I’ve seen and written about it before. For I most assuredly have thoughts about Demon Knight. Lots of them. I may not know much about important things like staying out of debt or maintaining friendships but my knowledge of Demon Knight is nothing less than granular. 

In making the big leap to the big screen Tales From the Crypt paradoxically became much smaller and more modest. 

With Demon Knight, an A-list horror anthology on the classiest channel on cable became an unmistakable, unapologetic B movie. For a trashy treasure trove of terror tales Tales From the Crypt boasted perhaps the most incredible cinematic pedigree in television at the time. 

Tales from the Crypt was famously Executive Produced by Robert Zemeckis, Richard Donner, Walter Hill, Joel Silver and David Giler and written and/or directed by an impressive array of frightmasters, big shots and moonlighting movie stars like Tom Hanks and Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

Tales From the Crypt promised, and delivered, beyond of course T&A and gore of both quantity and quality, major studio-level production values and star-power every week. Demon Knight, in sharp contrast, is a movie with the budget and production values of a television show. 

As a TV show, Tales From the Crypt had the money and power to do whatever it wanted but Demon Knight had to be careful and deliberate in how it allocated its limited resources. 

The budget for Demon Knight was so modest, in fact, that in some early drafts of the script the demons are clad in suit and ties like yuppies or the Blues Brothers. That’s right: the makers of a Tales From the Crypt movie called Demon Knight didn’t know if they’d have money for demons that look like demons and not Mormons. 

Demon Knight ultimately opted to splurge on demon make-up and demon special effects but I’m not sure that was the right choice. Ernest Dickerson’s cult classic has a lot of surprising weaknesses. Perhaps the most pronounced is that for a movie called Demon Knight from the make-up and special effects wizards at Tales From the Crypt the demons here look surprisingly crappy and cheesy, like cheaper, tackier, rejected versions of the Crypt-Keeper. 

Dickerson, who began his career as a cinematographer in television and film before making an assured transition to film with the classic 1992 crime drama Juice shoots much of Demon Knight in darkness because the film takes place at night and because it suits the story’s hard-boiled, comic book aesthetic but also as an only intermittently successful way of hiding the cheapness of the special effects and make-up. 

But if Demon Knight has some rather glaring flaws it has many of the strengths of the television show it successfully and faithfully adapts as well. Like its small screen counterpart it is a paradise for character actors and actresses, including the great William Sadler, the character actor in the lead role of Frank Brayker. 

As an actor, Sadler effortlessly conveys the world-weariness of men who have lived hard, difficult lives and seen things no man should. That makes him perfect for the role of an unlikely savior and World War I veteran who has lived multiple lives over a century after coming into possession of a key-like relic containing some of the blood of Jesus in it, never aging even as his mind and soul grow old and exhausted. 

Demon Knight opens at the very end of our hero’s epic battle to stave off the forces of Satanic darkness by keeping the magical MacGuffin out of the hands of The Collector (Billy Zane), a high-level demon seriously annoyed that he has to waste his time manipulating and destroying a species as puny and pathetic as human beings. 

Zane brings a glorious glibness to the role, a comic arrogance that comes from thinking, not incorrectly, that everyone you deal with represents a lower life form. 

The Collector initially tries to pass himself off as a cowboy-hatted Southern lawman in hot pursuit of a thief, a ruse he’s forced to abandon when he punches skeptical Sheriff Tupper (John Schuck of Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H and The Munsters Today) with such force that his fist goes all the way through his head and out the back of his skull. It’s a shock scare of appropriately visceral force and surprise that signals a shift in the narrative as The Collector is forced to give up the pretense of being human and reveals his evil true self. 

Frank Brayker eventually finds refuge from The Collector’s unrelenting pursuit in a flop house full of lost souls whose poignantly pathetic lives and equally poignant dreams we come to understand as they are picked off, one by one, by Zane’s cocky demon and his evil minions. 

Jada Pinkett-Smith is sexy without being overly sexualized (a difficult feat in a franchise ferociously dedicated to overly sexualizing women) and strong as Jerilyn, an ex-convict on work release who turns out to be the film’s Final Girl. 

As the aptly named Roach, Thomas Haden Church plays the film’s secondary villain as a sneering heavy so simultaneously arrogant and oblivious that he genuinely seems to think he can strike a deal with THE LIVING PERSONIFICATION OF SATANIC EVIL and come out on top. Like far too many tools of evil, he doesn’t seem to realize that a man of the devil is not also going to be a man of his words. 

Roach is in a sexual relationship Cordelia (Brenda Bakke), a sad-eyed sex worker misfit postal worker Wally (Charles Fleisher) pines for desperately despite knowing that he can never hope to have her. 

The always wonderful Dick Miller, meanwhile, plays Uncle Willy, a lovable alcoholic and crackpot philosopher. Nobody gets more out of dialogue like, “Boy, listen to that thunder! God's doing some serious thinkin' tonight. I bet he's saying, "On second thought, maybe I shoulda given it all to the monkeys” than Miller. 

In Demon Knight, the fate of the universe does not lie in the hands of holy men or soldiers or leaders but rather with the kind of marginal folks society has never valued or found much use for: ex-convicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, the marginally employed and of course the employees of our great postal service. 

Like Rio Bravo or Assault on Precinct 13, Demon Knight chronicles the desperate efforts of over-matched heroes trying to prevent unrelenting outside forces from penetrating their defenses in pursuit of a sinister goal. 

Demon Knight feels more than a little like the cinematic equivalent of a “bottle episode” in that it takes places almost entirely in one location, over the course of one very eventful night. Bottle episodes are often a way for veteran shows to cut down on their budgets and explore characters while cranking up the tension but Demon Knight was the HBO version of Tales From the Crypt’s cinematic debut. Then again Demon Knight’s modesty is a big part of its b-movie appeal. 

Demon Knight is not cheesy but good and fun. That would imply that its cheesiness is an impediment to it being an enjoyable, deeply satisfying cinematic experience when it’s actually intensely pleasurable precisely because it’s so unapologetically cheesy. 

This should have been the beginning to an endless series of Tales From the Crypt movies cranked out like clockwork every Halloween. Instead it was something closer to an end. Demon Knight was not the only Tales from the Crypt movie but it is the only one that wasn’t a flop (its poorly received follow-up, Bordello of Blood) or released direct to video in the United States (2002’s Ritual). 

I’m not ready to give up on the beautiful dream of Tales From the Crypt movies just yet. If they can reboot the franchise for television or streaming, as is periodically threatened, then they can make more movies based on Tales From the Crypt as well. If they do, I’ll be there on opening day, first in line, assuming, of course, that I’m able to go to movie theaters again at some point in the future. 

A world without movie theaters: now that, boils and ghouls, is fucking terrifying. 

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