The Demons Of Ludlow

Pianist Envy

The Demons Of Ludlow
USA 1983 Directed by Bill Rebane
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers I guess... if you ever wanted to watch this one.

The Demons Of Ludlow is the fourth film of six of this director’s movies featured in Arrow’s Weird Wyoming - The Bill Rebane Collection and, alas, it’s not a great one either. Nowhere near as good as the one film from this set so far which I did really like, The Alpha Incident (reviewed by me here).

The film stars Paul Bentzen as the preacher of the small village community of Ludlow and, he’s an actor I actually quite like, having been exposed to him purely from the films in this boxed edition (he was also in The Alpha Incident and Invasion From Inner Earth, reviewed here). It’s a shame then that it turns out the actor only made seven movies in his whole life... he didn’t play in his next two films (his last) for over 20 years after making this one. Here, he is one of the two main protagonists, along with a woman who is returning to Ludlow after a long absence, having left the village as a teen. Now, however, she’s a reporter and, remembering the terrible old stories of her grandfather, she returns when it’s celebrating 200 years since it was founded, to see if there’s a story.

Turns out, there is.

This film is an unashamed cash grab/emulation of all those popular American slashers of the 1980s, specifically those with a supernatural bent. In this case, it shares more than a few similarities with John Carpenter’s, then fairly recent, all time classic horror The Fog (reviewed here). Alas, although it shares a few thematic elements with the Carpenter movie, such as the bicentennial celebrations and some homicidal ghosts wandering around, it doesn’t really share the quality of the partial inspiration for it and, although Rebane occasionally tries to lift the film with interesting stabs of shot design, there’s nothing as interesting as in The Alpha Incident. A shot where the preacher (who finds an ancient artefact in a wall, just like Father Malone in The Fog), is framed in a mirror and another person framed within a cross in that same mirror is notable but, not something that can save the movie. There are some nice shots of long cast shadows throughout but, nothing that really catches the eye and interests the mind on a visual level consistently, I felt.

The town takes receipt, on its 200 year birthday, of an old piano sent by the family of the man named Ludlow, who founded the town originally. However, it turns out his hands were cut off and he was exiled from the village and sent away to England... but now he’s returned in the form of this ‘haunted’ piano, along with his old timey ghost cronies... to shoot, stab, hang and tear people apart with some of the cheaper and unimpressive practical effects I’ve seen in 1980s horror movies, it has to be said. One guy’s bloody stumps where his hands should have been are literally just him clenching his fists with a bit of red on them, for instance.

The piano itself is kinda strange apart from, you know, being haunted. When it’s played it starts off sounding a little like a harpsichord but then you realise it’s just a synthesiser being played on the soundtrack and you don’t even need to see the various actors’ hand movements not synching up to tell you this. It sounds just awful and, though Ric Coken and Steven Kuether’s score is mostly appropriate, coming off with a kind of cheap Bach on a Casio synth vibe to it, it’s nothing to write home about either and, to be honest, adds no tension to the film. It’s a million miles away from the terrifying synth scores that Carpenter was supplying for his movies.

There’s also a strange, glowy, neon green hand which occasionally makes a killing entrance onto a scene or two but, yeah, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything in the plot (other than it’s on the side of the ghosts). Perhaps it’s a stand in for one of the town patron’s hands but, yeah, it looks more like an alien hand, to be honest. Either way, it fails to be unsettling and maybe that’s my main take away from this movie. The Demons Of Ludlow is a comfortable feeling film but it’s not really entertaining in any manner and it totally fails to be scary or disturbing at any point. There are no scenes in the movie which are likely to scare you the way the director is obviously intending they will so, yeah, it just feels a bit damp and limp and I really can’t work up enough enthusiasm to object to it, in all honesty. It is what it is and it’s probably not something I’d recommend, to be honest and... having a flying piano near the end in no way makes up for anything else in the movie. These aren’t the demons you’re looking for.