The Demons of Ludlow

source: The Demons of Ludlow

Moviecut—The Demons of Ludlow

The Demons of Ludlow (1983) * 1/2 (out of 4) The town of Ludlow is celebrating their bicentennial but things don't go as planned. The town has restored a piano that has been in the town since the beginning but they don't realize that it's actually haunted and soon the vengeful spirit of a pirate is killing people in the town. THE DEMONS OF LUDLOW comes from director Bill Rebane who is best remembered for his notorious THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION. This film here isn't a very good one but at the same time I must say that on a technical level it might be the best I've seen from the director. It's certainly not as entertaining as his BLOOD HARVEST but there are some decent things here for fans of the genre. I think the film has a couple effective moments including the ending when the ghosts actually appear and start to come out for their fun. Another effective scene has a woman in bed when she comes under attack by one of the ghosts and her daughter. The film needed a lot more scenes like this one as it really could have been a classic. There's also some minor gore that you'd expect from a horror film of this period. Also, if you've seen Ulli Lommel's THE DEVONSVILLE TERROR you'll notice many of the same actors and setting. However, the biggest problem with this picture is that it's deadly dull at times. The majority of the running time has a couple people doing an investigation so we've got a lot of scenes where they're just sitting around talking and I must admit that it was nearly impossible to stay awake during them. The story just isn't original or interesting enough to put up with all these dialogue scenes and it really drags the film out. It has elements of THE FOG and even a bit of THE SHINING but it just doesn't have the story to carry it.

A brother and sister return to their hometown after years of being away to research their family. They discover that all descendants of an evil ancient relative are cursed to die at the hands of vengeful spirits which haunt an old piano, passed down through the generations. Although it begins slowly, there are a few genuinely creepy moments throughout an the town actually has an eerie quality to it. Despite these though the film descends into silliness at all levels; unintentional laughs aplenty here. The ghosts themselves look like costume-party goers who have just had their party cancelled at the last minute! This rather shoddy film (about a haunted piano of all things!) probably won't appeal to everyone. However, if you can get past it's terrible lighting, ropey special effects, poor acting and shaky script enough to see this through, you just might find a little brainless entertainment value from it.

Take John Carpenter's "The Fog" and remove the part about pirates reclaiming their buried treasure and substitute that with a musician reclaiming his hands, and you have Demons of Ludlow - just a much tackier version, mind you. Bill Rebane, a director with the same loathsome reputation as Ulli Lommel, directs this ripoff of "The Fog" with uneven results. I have seen worse films but Demons of Ludlow is far from a classic. However, when comparing this film to Rebane's "The Cold" - this is a masterpiece. This film centers on a New England community celebrating its 200th anniversary. A gift from the town founder's descendant is presented at the festival - a white piano. However, when the piano arrives to Ludlow, people start disappearing or dying in gruesome fashion. VIOLENCE: $$$ (There is a sprinkling of violence throughout the film but keep in mind, this was made in the early 1980's and the effects are poor by today's standards. We have a decapitation, hanging, gunplay and some levitating objects). NUDITY: $ (Demons eat dinner at a cantankerous shrew's house and become fixated with her mentally unstable daughter Patricia Statz. They tear off her nightgown and give the viewer a brief flash of nakedness. Also Debra Dulman, who has a perfect body, spends the entire movie in various stages of undress). STORY: $$ (The story isn't bad but is a blatant ripoff of "The Fog." Having people die whenever someone tickles the piano's ivories was a neat little plot tidbit. The main plot line is to see if nosy reporter Stephanie Cushna can find out anything about Ludlow's past and why these strange events are taking place). ACTING: $$ (Nothing great here. I assure you, when you pop this sucker into your VCR you will not see a single recognizable face. Most of the actors have gone on to real jobs or at least discarded the movie making business. Stephanie Cushna does the best job here, as does Von Huesen as the woeful preacher).

This is a movie about a dying community with a curse on it. Back in Colonial times some guy who played the piano got his hands chopped off. Because of that, his supernatural being is going to make all town members pay for it. His old piano (harpsichord) is sent to the town on their bicentennial celebration. The people who play it go into hysterical contortions like those folks in reefer madness. Also, bad things begin to happen. Spirits are set free. They are dressed in cheap Thanksgiving costumes. But they are deadly. Also, lots of people like to show up in their underwear before being accosted by these Pilgrim bullies. There's a few pirates around too. There is some gore in it but the rules are never precisely clear and we need to figure them out as we go. There is a bouncing piano. Not exactly Citizen Kane.

Although the first one/third is a little slow, 'The Demons of Ludlow' winds up being a surprisingly decent little B horror flick. The premise is very good, with a 200-year-old New England town in which the history has mysteriously disappeared and those who know about it refuse to talk. A pair of apparent siblings, supposedly on some sort of journalistic assignment are in town, checking into its history, when a historic piano, belonging to the town's founder, is returned to the town by the founders' ancestors. As soon as the apparently generous gift is received, locals begin dying grizzly deaths. There are a few plot holes and one gets a bit tired of the preacher's alcoholic wife constantly calling, "Chris, is that YOU?" The DVD I have (part of a collection of 50 B thrillers) is a bit dark and in a few cases it is hard to tell one female from another – not to mention one figure running through the snow in the distance from another. Plus, about the second and third/eighths of the film seems to bog down a little, and the colonial ghosts somehow all resemble pirates. Still, it manages to capture a creepy mood that works pretty well. For a 26-year-old low-budget film, it has some pretty good special effects and the unknown cast does decent enough work. Overall, it's one of the better ones I've found so far on this super collection of B and C horror flicks. If you like B horror, this is well worth watching.

Damned, talk about bad luck! The brief plot description on the DVD-cover sounded remotely interesting and I actually put my hopes up to see some delightfully cheesy 80's gore. Then you discover that the film is directed by Bill Rebane and suddenly all your expectations vanish! No offense Bill, but you're a ham director and it looks like you deliberately ruin all the scripts that end up in your hands. "The Demons of Ludlow" shamelessly rips off John Carpenter's "The Fog", with the plot about a snowy little town that celebrates its two hundredth anniversary. But the history pages of Ludlow are written in innocent blood and vengeful spirits return to present day to kill the descendants of the town's founding fathers. See, pretty much identical to Carpenter's classic. I don't have a problem with imitations (loads of great horror films borrow ideas from others), but the elaboration here is really weak and pathetic. For example: the titular demons live inside an antique piano (?), they can perfectly fire off shotguns, they take over the plastic bodies of a little girl's dolls and, when they eventually killed everybody they hated, they do a little bit of ballroom dancing!?! Most sequences are just incredibly boring, with tedious dialogs and atrocious acting performances, and the supposedly horrific moments only evoke feelings of pity. Ever seen a bleeding piano float in the air while cheesy laughter can be heard? Didn't think so... Personally, I couldn't wait to see all the characters die painful deaths and I was secretly hoping that the possessed piano would eventually crash-land on director Rebane. Insufferable 80's crap, avoid at all costs.

Okay, I must say the plot is so hard to follow that I may get a few facts wrong so forgive me. Ludlow is a cursed coastal town due to the townspeople cutting off a man's hands in the 1860s. To celebrate the towns 200th anniversary a harpsichord is given as a gift. Evidently it is the same harpsichord that was in town the night Vincent Ludlow was tried. His spirit and those of some others haunt the instrument so when it's played strange things happen. Ludlow's spirit is out for revenge and is killing the descendants of those who wronged him. It's a lot like The Fog but not as good. The cast includes a reporter named Debra who is in town for some reason I couldn't find and by her own admission even she can't figure out why she is investigating Ludlows past. The other main character is a preacher named Chris who loses his hands at the end of the movie. This would be fine except there's so many subplots that go nowhere. They never establish that Debra is a reporter so you just sort of figure it out. The fact that the descendants are being targeted by Ludlow is not even said until late in the film although it is known by the preacher and the mayor the whole time. The movie does some things right. It is sufficiently creepy. The opening music is good. The filming gives you a good sense of isolation from the outside world. That being said, the writing is so poor that the plot never comes together so the end makes you just shrug your shoulders and say "whatever". I know budget constraints can make effects look cheesy but this one's problems go beyond that. I don't think that Halloween was all that expensive to make but since it is well put together you put aside the green leaves in October. Demons of Ludlow's shortcomings can't be overlooked. In some odd way I do like this movie. 70's and 80's cheese always appeals to me. I also live in Wisconsin so Bill Rebane's films hit home. If you like low budget horror than this one's for you but be warned, it's bad.

I think The Demons of Ludlow may very well be director Bill Rebane's masterpiece. Anyone familiar with Bill's output will be well aware that this is a very relative statement, seeing as this is the man partially responsible for Monster a-Go Go and fully responsible for The Cold. Yep, Rebane well and truly operates in the Z-Grade sphere of the film industry. So all things considered, I was pleasantly surprised with The Demons of Ludlow. Not that it is by any means a good film – it's shoddy – but it has some moments that actually could be described as being effective. And overall it does sort of have a strange charm of sorts. The story is about a cursed piano that harbours an evil entity that unleashes all manner of nasty events onto the inhabitants of a tiny town called Ludlow. It seems that this is all tied in with nefarious events that occurred hundreds of years ago, and its all part of a deadly revenge Like you should expect, production values are basic as hell. But the film does have a sense of place at least; the snowy remote community is fairly believable, while it also manages to incorporate some period costumes and even utilizes some raw but not entirely awful special-effects – so the movie does at least have some ambition. Of course it would be wrong not to acknowledge that The Demons of Ludlow has a fair few flaws too. It's quite haphazardly put together and is verging on being senseless a lot of the time, while the low budget does show in more or less every frame. Pacing, too, isn't always its strong point but it does at least provide a lot of varied events to keep us entertained, many of which seem to involve acts of violence. The best singular scene has to be when the disturbed young girl happens upon the demons at the table in the dining room. This sequence was even verging on actually being quite scary. Although it would be remiss to not add that many of the horror set-pieces are in actual fact pretty hilarious – the little girl ghost lobbing rocks at the old woman's coupon being a very good example. All-in-all though, this has to be considered a success, seeing as it's a Bill Rebane film. Not for everyone to be fair, but if you don't mind dipping your toes into Z-Grade waters then you might have quite a good time with this.