Of course I had never even heard about this 1987 horror movie titled "Demon of Paradise" from director Cirio H. Santiago, prior to stumbling upon it by blind luck here in 2024. And with it being a horror movie that I hadn't seen, much less heard about, of course I had to check it out.
The storyline felt somewhat erratic and a bit incoherent. Sure, there was a plot to it, but it just felt like director Cirio H. Santiago was taking a lot of detours to show random things that really didn't do much to further the narrative of the movie. And for a movie about a creature terrorizing a tourist location, there wasn't actually a whole lot of creature footage in the movie.
Writers Frederick Bailey and C. J. Santiago just didn't manage to deliver a particularly impressive script or storyline here for director Cirio H. Santiago to bring to the screen.
Needless to say that I wasn't familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list.
The movie is supposed to be taking place on Hawaii, but it is filmed in the Philippines, and it just looks nothing like Hawaii. And that just made the entire movie feel sort of very staged and difficult to delve into, because you don't believe it to be Hawaii for even a split second.
I found the movie to not be worth spending 87 minutes on watching. The movie just doesn't have any particular entertainment value to it, not today and I doubt it even did so back in 1987.
My rating of "Demon of Paradise" lands on a generous three out of ten stars, given mostly because of the production value raising the score up a notch.