Demon of Paradise (1987)

Fantastic!

Excellent but underrated film

As Good As It Gets

The acting in this movie is really good.

Even films that are blatant rip-offs of far superior films have some good merits of their own and the Jaws rip-offs are no exceptions. Films like Joe Dante's excellent "Piranha" (1978); Charles B. Griffith's campy "Up from the Depths" (1979); and the MST3K-target "Devil Fish" (1984) are basically Jaws rip-offs, but each film makes up for this by doing at least one thing right to make it their own. Whether the merits include: decent acting, likable characters, decent writing, decent characters, good creature effects, et cetera. Whatever the case may be at least one of these are present in each film (or all like in "Piranha"). Unfortunately no such merits are found in "Demon of Paradise" whatsoever.*SPOILERS* Not only is it a "Jaws" rip-off, but a its a "Creature from the Black Lagoon" rip-off that's stitched together to create a Frankenstein-esque mess. The basic plot is that it takes place in "Hawaii" (the Philippines) where hunters' illegal dynamite fishing awaken a prehistoric fish- monster-man (which looks like the secret love child of the Beast from "Krull" and the tree monster from the 1957 film, "From Hell it Came") that the locals believe to be a mythical creature. Once awake the monster begins to terrorize the locals (those dumb enough not to leave after finding the first body) and guests at a tropical resort. Now its up to Sheriff Keefer (played by Steis who looks like a failed clone of David Carradine) and the herpetologist, Annie (Witt), to track down the lethal living fossil before it kills anymore people.Throughout the course of the film there is the standard skepticism followed by a greedy moron (Cahill, the resort owner) wanting to profit on the local lore and finally an all-out hunt for the creature. In addition there's a pointless side-story involving criminals illegally making explosives which adds nothing to the main story save for colliding with the creature story at the end of a shoot-out with the cops. Once the creature's existence is confirmed the National Guard are called in only to leave save for a few troops the commander leaves with them. The movie ends with the real heroes, the National Guard, using grenades to blow the creature suit into green chunks as the two leads look on doing nothing. Yes, the creature is killed by nameless extras and not the main character. Anyway Keefer reasonably assumes it's over, but Annie "ominously" asks "have you ever cut the tail off a lizard" implying the creature might have the ability to regenerate it's entire body cut to one of the creature's arms floating down into the stream before abruptly ending. Although it sounds serviceable on a B-movie level it still fails.The main reason "Demon of Paradise" fails is because it commits the worst B-movie sin a movie like it can commit: it's boring. Why is it boring? Where to start? The two leads act as if they're on tranquilizers and the side-characters are cookie-cutter generic, annoying, or both. Even on the level of a Jaws knock-off it's exceptionally awful because it does not even make an attempt on the most basic level other films in its class made. What it results in is a rip-off that does nothing with the source material and chooses the lazy way by creating an inferior carbon copy of elements from two classics for the price of one in every way possible.In addition it makes the mistake of taking itself too seriously which one might think would make it unintentionally funny, but it doesn't go overboard and suffers for said misstep. You can find the film on a Double Feature DVD of Roger Corman's Cult Classics series alongside "Up from the Depths" which is the far superior film in the Double Feature.Simply put "Up from the Depths" succeeded by having decent acting; at least one likable character; intentionally over-the-top performances; self-awareness. Unfortunately for "Demon of Paradise" no such thing is present here leaving the boring story to trudge along as the boring set- pieces and boring, inferior carbon copied characters make no effort to get anything moving. As a result viewers are left watching an unappealing mass of waste taken from great films and asked to stare at it for over 80 minutes floating face-down in the water.

One of my many personal defaults is that, for some incomprehensible reason, I desperately desire to see all the cheesy mutant sea/swamp monster movies ever made. Knowing that approximately 95% of those are incompetent and amateurish Z-grade trash productions, my obsession is actually the equivalent of cinematic self-torture! "Demon of Paradise" is another piece of rock-bottom, pretty much on par with notorious titles such as "Zaat", "Octaman", "Spawn of the Slithis", "Hydra", "Rana: Legend of Shadow Lake", "Monstroid" and "Up from the Depths". If none of these titles rings a bell, that means there still hope for you! Stay away from them as far as possible! "Demon of Paradise" takes place in a small Hawaiian fishing community, where the obnoxious villagers have been using so much illegal dynamite in their profession that it has awakened an ancient and very upset lizard monster. What follows is an incredibly boring and clichéd film with immeasurably long sequences where nothing happens and pseudo-intellectual dialogs that are irrelevant and senseless. The monster itself is reasonably good-looking, although it's another umpteenth attempt to imitate the appearance of the "Creature of the Black Lagoon", but it nearly doesn't receive enough screen time. Cirio H. Santiago produced and directed approximately 80 exploitation films in his life, all of them shamelessly cashing in on some trend that was popular and money-earning at some point. I've only seen a handful of his titles, but more than enough to declare him to be one of the worst directors who ever lived.

A quick Summary of this film: A Green Fish like Monster takes a liking to eating people 0n the Paradise island of Hawaii.With the low budget and poor acting the only watchable aspects about this film are the scenes showing the Wildlife and the Island. I managed to watch the whole film on my Film philosophy that it can only get better, Unfortuantly it Didn't!Why i gave it 2/10 instead of 1/10 shows the quality of films i have seen in my life time. I would say avoid but make your own mind up....Next

Some fishermen using dynamite manage to blow themselves up and an undersea lizard man starts attacking people. Stuff blows up every once in a while.A woman decides to promote her resort in the area of the monster sightings to people into the Loch Ness Monster, the abominable snowman, and the yeti. She hires an obnoxious reporter as her PR man. A bunch of people do show up. She has a monster egg hunt, and there's no payoff for this: we see the hunt begin, but do not see them find either the egg she hid, or a real monster egg (if there were any). The hunt starts, and then all of a sudden it's nighttime.One woman takes her top off and goes swimming. She has a nice figure. Nothing happens to her, which is OK, but there's not even any suspense in the scene.At one point the monster somehow jumps up out of the water, grabs onto a helicopter, and pulls it down into the water. This was pretty hilarious. Then the copter predictably explodes.Inexplicably, the monster is bulletproof. Grenades, however, are capable of decapitating it. Is there more than one? You'd think so, but I don't know.Not worth watching at all. You're much better off with the Creature from the Black Lagoon series, and Humanoids from the Deep. The back of the video box states "Come along on this tour and get it all., plus an unadvertised bonus: 84 minutes of monstrous terror." If the movie is 84 minutes long, how is its running time a bonus? If it is advertised by that blurb, how is it unadvertised?