Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight

With impressive heroics, creepy villains, and the best popping eyeballs since Evil Dead II, the movie is relentlessly moral, cartoonishly violent, and consistently fun. Read full review

Good-humored gore, ably directed by Ernest Dickerson (JUICE), formerly Spike Lee's cinematographer. Read full review

It's trashy to the bone, but director Ernest Dickerson targets just the right tone for tension and comic relief, and keeps the whole thing rolling in Grand Guignol style. It may be disposable, but "Demon Knight" is never boring. It's consistently hilarious and just outrageous enough to make Gaines spin happily in his grave. [13 Jan 1995, p.H26]

Zane is an absolute blast, whether doing a little dance or trying to steal his way into each character's soul, he's having too much fun. Read full review

Gruesome, garish and smutty in a very juvenile way, Knight - the first of a promised trilogy - nonetheless is often frightfully engaging, thanks to a game group of performers and visually electric direction from Ernest Dickerson (Juice). [13 Jan 1995, p.4D]

It's not classic horror, but it'll do. [13 Jan 1995, p.18]

What "Tales From the Crypt" does best is sustain a look and tone that bring a comic-book's broad strokes into the realm of a live-action movie without seeming too mannered or arty. The film's gooey monsters with their electric green eyes and ferocious voracity are among the more convincing zombie demons to be found in a recent horror film. Read full review

Mix "Night of the Living Dead" with Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" movies, then add a hefty dose of "Beavis and Butt-Head"-style silliness, and you have "Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight," a fang-in-cheek horror thriller that likely will please fans and turn off non-devotees. Read full review

The silly story is basically just an excuse for some thrills and goofy one-liners, but even if the more likable characters tended to get killed off too early for my taste, I wasn't bored. Read full review

The movie isn't particularly well-paced, and I found it dull. But I've got to give credit to Todd Masters, who designed the special-effects makeup, to Gilbert Adler, who directed the Crypt Keeper sequences, and to Zane, who plays the Collector with style and wit. If I were 12, I might've loved it. Read full review

The level of humor, of course, is familiarly low -- with nothing more deadly than the Crypt Keeper's puns ("Frights! Camera! Hack-tion!"). As for the gore, let's just say the demons are slimy, heads do roll and bodies are ripped asunder Read full review

But in the absence of prime-time thrills, and more than a snip or two of the TV series' cutting wit, 95 minutes is a long time to stretch this simple-minded stuff. [13 Jan 1995, p.33]

While the gore has made the jump safely, the wit seems to have disappeared. [13 Jan 1995, p.6G]

To paraphrase Joe Bob: Heads roll, arms roll, a face gets squashed like an overripe papaya, about 15 gallons of blood, several gratuitous shots of nekkid women, and plenty of beasts - including the Cryptkeeper, who bookends the flick with his usual pun-laden flair. Joe Bob might say check it out, then feel sorry he did. [13 Jan 1995, p.8C]

Despite its aspirations to big-screen scares, this delivers more kitsch than a truckload of glow-in-the-dark skeletons. Read full review

Feels pedestrian and moribund. Read full review

Demon Knight may be a good career move by director Ernest Dickerson ( "Juice" ), proving that he can work with a reasonably large budget on a genre film. But the picture breaks no ground, and in terms of his own development, it's hardly a step forward. Read full review

PRESUMABLY this zombie flick is supposed to be funny, since it's about as scary as "Little Women." [18 Jan 1995, p.6F]

Despite the strength of the cast, Demon Knight stumbles over its own indecision. It's a scream, up until the laughing stops.

To call Demon Knight a popcorn movie is to give it too much credit — I doubt it would raise the pulse of Orville Redenbacher. Read full review

Based on the quality of the screenplay alone, “Demon Knight” is strictly a direct-to-video affair; with “Tales From the Crypt” tacked to the title, the budget expands exponentially to accommodate state-of-the-art special effects--most of them featuring dismemberment, naturally. Read full review

Good entertainment stretched to three times its natural length is rarely three times better, but bad entertainment dragged out that long will typically be three times worse. In the case of Demon Knight -- which probably doesn't have ten minutes of worthwhile material -- such a statement could be regarded as infinitely kind. Read full review

When the slimy creatures pop out of the ground in Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight, one of the hapless humans in their path advises that the most strategic weapon to try is "anything that destroys their eyes and frees their tortured souls." Anyone exposed to this nauseating piece of brain-dead nonsense may want the same treatment. [13 Jan 1995, p.16]