I read about this seldom screened, but highly regarded cult film, Demon Lover Diary, about a year ago on the Onion’s AV Club and have wanted to see it ever since. Tuesday I’ll get my chance as the mighty Cinefamily organization is screening the film as part of their monthlong horror fest,

In early 1975, Donald E. Jackson—who would later become the junk-drawer auteur responsible for stuff like Hell Comes To Frogtown and Lingerie Kickboxer—began working on his first feature film, a low-budget horror movie called The Demon Lover. He and his cartoonish hustler of a partner, Jerry Younkins, hired a young filmmaker named Jeff Kreines to handle cinematography. Promised a paycheck that never materialized, Kreines headed to Michigan to start work, accompanied by his pal Mark Rance and his girlfriend Joel DeMott. As time passed—and it became clear that Jackson and Younkins were a couple of no-account hustlers with no idea how to make a movie, and no aesthetic values beyond cutting corners at every opportunity—DeMott decided to make her own movie about the making of The Demon Lover.

Predating American Movie by decades, Demon Lover Diary has many of the same qualities, but where Mark Borchardt is likeable and pitiable, Jackson is a two-bit creep who appears to have blown off his own finger in order to finance the movie with workers’ compensation money. The production is so hopeless and haphazard that DeMott’s movie about it begins to take on a hilariously surrealistic quality, as she and Kreines (who became respected documentarians) display the kind of black humor seen in soldiers who think they’re going to die in combat. Though hard to find, Demon Lover Diary is a funny, essential document on the seamy side of independent filmmakint

Dir. Joel DeMott, 1980, 16mm, 90 min.

The Cinefamily, 611 N. Fairfax Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90036