So, a quick note here while I've got a moment away from the paper shredder (I swear I'm gonna go Leatherface on the first person I meet who sends out junk mail)

In case you didn't see yet, my newest review of Tales from the Crypt Presents:  Demon Knight is up.  I apologize for its length but the movie is very plot heavy.  I mean, the review is that long, and I only covered a third of the plot.  But there's something no one here knows about my personal love of this movie, not even The Horror Czar who edited the "director's cut" so to speak.

As I've mentioned before on here, I wrote a very long thesis on the evolution of the female protagonist in horror that, probably relatively soon, I'm going to start going through and editing and then blogging in installments.  I've kept relatively mum about the movies that I covered though in it because, while mostly I covered the standards (Carrie, Friday the 13th, the entire Nightmare on Elm Street series), I did do something very different in it that one of my advisers on the thesis didn't like.  When I was covering the rise of the masculine female in the nineties, I used two movies to illustrate my point.  While it is more a crime thriller, I couldn't NOT use Silence of the Lambs....and the other movie I chose was Demon Knight.  My adviser thought that its inclusion reduced the impact of the paperand that it had no place in such a scholarly type of paper.  My adviser happened to be a published film critic/author who wrote books on various genres and movies.  My argument?  I ignored him and adjusted how I introduced it, basically inserting a few lines in the paper as a big middle finger to him:

" While The Silence of the Lambs has transcended its genre to be described by some as one of the greatest movies of all time, another movie which features a hybrid female protagonist released in the same decade was passed over by critics and is generally underappreciated by many.  That film is Ernest Dickerson’s Tales from the Crypt Presents:  Demon Knight.  The movie deserves a place in this essay because, like other movies discussed here or in essays, an analyst can make an argument that Jeryline, the female hero of the film, does represent a change and departure from characters in previous films, a fact that is not necessarily diminished by a low box-office gross or by a panning given by some critics."

So.  Much like the Horror Czar pushes for acceptance of Darkness Falls as a good horror movie, so to do I push for Demon Knight to be accepted.    To say that a movie with a cult following, like Demon Knight, does not deserve praise is to say that other cult movies do not, i.e. Rocky Horror Picture Show, May, or Donnie Darko.  And that is an injustice to both the movies themselves and the fans who support them.  And I'm glad that I was able to do my small part here to try and get the movie out more.