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ATTACK OF THE DEMONS
Director: Eric Power Cast: The voices of Thomas Petersen, Andreas Petersen, Katie Maguire, Eric Power, August Sargenti MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:15 Release Date: 10/30/20 (virtual cinema); 11/3/20 (digital & on-demand) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 29, 2020 The closing credits of Attack of the Demons are surprisingly—as in startlingly—short. They consist of maybe 20 or so people: director and sole animator Eric Power, screenwriter Andreas Petersen, composer John Dixon, a small team of producers, and the voice actors. The fact that such a small group of people could independently and successfully complete an animated movie, even one as short and fairly rudimentary as this one, is an accomplishment worth championing. As for the movie itself, it probably could have used a few more minds and eyes on the project. Power's movie—about a small town overrun by, as you likely have guessed, demons—plays with subdued humor and a reliance on the notion that its makeshift look will somehow carry it. A lot of it seems like an inside joke to which we are not privy. The style is animation exclusively using paper/cardboard cutouts. We can mostly forgive the jerky movements and haphazard design as a key component of Power's handmade approach, as well as the fact that he apparently did most or all of the actual work himself. Again, with that solely in mind, the effort is pretty impressive. Less impressive are the story, the tone, the pacing, the comic timing, the dialogue, and the gags. In small mountain town in Colorado (not the one of which you, because of the animation style, are probably thinking), an annual Halloween festival is underway. A mysterious, cloaked figure turns up on stage, chants an incantation, and, in an explosion of goo, unleashes a curse upon the audience, turning them into undead vessels for an army of demons. A trio of heroes, each with a certain cultural obsession (movies, music, and video games), try to stop them. The allure here has to be the crude animation. Power relies on a lot of sight gags, involving blood and guts and a decapitated head that maneuvers with the points of its forked tongue—going through its nostrils and coming out of its ears. That's a good thing, because the clunky dialogue, spoken with such long pauses and in such shifting quality that we wonder if any of the actors were remotely near each other in space and/or time, never makes the other jokes work. Attack of the Demons deserves some praise for its look and its low-budget existence. That's about it. Copyright © 2020 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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