Demon Squad

I am a huge Paranormal film noir fan. That said, I knew this didn't have a huge budget, but from the first scene in the demon bar I was hooked. I liked the snarky Nick Moon and his plucky Girl Friday. It made me glad I have amazon prime.

The story was whatever. Demon hunter/gumshoe falls for sexy client. They fight demons. Not original but that's fine.

The problem was the acting. It was atrocious. Watching wasn't bad but listening was another story. Might have been a better movie with the volume down and closed captioning on.

My rating is based on what the film makers and actors did with the obviously very small budget.

There is a magic macguffin the PI is trying to find. The opening scene in a dive bar turned paranormal bar is really good. They got a number of extras and did really good work with the small amount of makeup budget.

Given the limited number of sets the whole crew did a nice job. The story makes sense, internally there are no glaring plotholes.

Character motives are clear, the cheap special effects are pretty good in context.

The dialog broke down too quiet several times, I am sure because of the budget.

I think like others who have watched this, I watched in MST3K S13. That is the only way that I could have possibly gotten through this. I wouldn't suggest anyone raw dog this.

The overacting felt insulting. The shaky camera was dizzying. The sets were extremely low budget making it look like a student film. Lighting in many scenes was practically forgotten. Movies this bad usually have a certain charm about them, but honestly this one didn't have anything. It struck me that the production didn't enjoy making it.

It is described as film noir. I wouldn't, unless you count one or two lazy archetypes trying to achieve that.

The prosthetic makeup was I guess the only positive. A good showcase for the films make up artist.

The make up effects were pretty good.

The costumes looked like they were purchased from a cheap Halloween store or some hot glued craft stand at a local comic con.

The acting was atrocious, and not even in a they did the best they could with a bad script kind of way, but in a complete lack of comedic timing or I'm just reading the lines for the first time with no emotion kind of way. Some of it was almost laughably bad.

The script was cringy is hell. Some bad action movie cliches followed by a generic and boring plot.

Skip it and save yourself the grueling 98 minutes a third of it being a tedious overdrawn out interrogation scene where the actors try and fail to be intimidating.