Writer(s): Bava, Dario Argento, Dardano Sacchetti, and Franco Ferrini, from a story by Sacchetti
Starring: Urbano Barberini, Natasha Hovey, Karl Zinny, and Fiore Argento
It can be amazing how the human mind can evolve over
time. Naturally, we outgrow certain
things, like our propensity to play with tiny cars or dolls; that’s not really
the part that’s confusing. I’m focused
more on how certain memories—not just from childhood, but from any earlier
point in life—can remain held in such high regard for so many years, but upon
revisiting that memory, it can take a complete 180-degree turn in a matter of
minutes.
Exhibit A: Lamberto Bava’s Demons, a movie which I had
nothing but fond memories of from my teenage years. Now, even in my young naïveté, I was always
aware that this was a bad movie. There’s
no real way to deny that; the characters are so ignorant that they don’t even
resemble actual humans, the dialogue is atrocious, and the plot is half-assed
and pointless. But there’s one area
where the movie excels, and that’s in the special effects department. I always remembered that the demons looked
cool, and the gore effects were strong.
Revisiting it today (and showing it to my wife for the first
time) was one of those times when nostalgia felt like it stabbed me in the
back; as bad as I knew the movie was going to be, it was even worse. Don’t get me wrong: Demons can be a very
entertaining movie. It might be for all
the wrong reasons—it feels like you’re watching a joke that everyone is in on
except the filmmakers—but at the very least, it’s not boring. Well, not at first. The characters are so inept that there are
many classic nuggets of unintentional hilarity, which help to hold your
attention until the demons come, and the killings start.
This isn’t one of those movies where a plot discussion is
even necessary, but here goes: Cheryl (the beautiful Natasha Hovey) is given a
random movie ticket by a bizarre, mute stranger. Frightened by the ordeal, she does what any
other normal person would do: request
another ticket for her friend, Kathy.
The ticket has nothing but the name of the theater on it (the Metropol),
which no one has ever heard of. Not to
be off-put by such a small mystery, like how a huge theater gets put up in the
middle of a very busy city essentially overnight, Cheryl enthusiastically talks
Kathy into going with her.
We get a wide cast of stereotypical characters, though none
of them really belong. Like a pimp with
two of his hoes, one of whom just has to try on a decorative metal mask and
nick her face, and a blind man, who apparently enjoys going to movies so he can
annoy the people around him when he constantly requests his daughter to
describe everything that’s happening on the screen. Once the movie-within-a-movie begins, we get
our first glimpse of the similarities between it, and the action inside the
theater: It’s every bit as poorly
written and acted. Then, a short while
later, we catch a glimpse of another resemblance to the two movies: What’s
happening on the screen, is very similar to the events happening in the theater
itself! It all starts when a character in
the movie nicks his face on a metal mask that they find in the tomb of
Nostradamus (?). Uh oh, sound
familiar? One of the pimp’s hoes cut her
face on a metal mask outside of the theater, too!
This turns her into a demon.
I’m not quite sure how, and neither are the writers (characters go from
thinking it’s the movie, to the theater itself, before abandoning any interest
into what’s causing it shortly thereafter), but I guess it really doesn’t
matter, because for a little while, we get some much-needed gore! As remembered, the effects really are great,
as are the makeup effects. The demons
look appropriately threatening and aggressive, and we are treated to such
scenes as a woman being scalped, and a man getting his eyes gouged out.
The only problem is that the movie just keeps going on, and
on, and the characters only get dumber and dumber. For example, the survivors spend several
minutes tearing up the seats in the theater, and using them to block any way
in, hoping they can hide out until help comes.
Then one character simply hears a noise on the other side of a door, and
is somehow not only convinced that it is someone that’s come to help them, but
easily manages to convince everyone else.
Whoops! Turns out it wasn’t a
police officer or friendly person after all, but a group of demons! Oh well.
It was a simple misunderstanding that could have happened to anyone.
It’s just under 90 minutes long, but it felt like two full
hours by the time it was done; about ten minutes of that comes courtesy of an
ending that needlessly rambles on, merely enforcing a point (and diluting the
effect of said point) that it already made completely clear. It does attempt one final twist (cleverly
after it starts rolling credits and we have put our guards down), but it easily
could have done the same thing a lot sooner.
I get that old-school Italian horror movies are not known
for their intelligence, and just about all of them are shining examples of
style over substance. I enjoy a good
number of these films (with Lucio Fulci’s Zombie and Dario Argento’s Suspiria springing immediately to mind), but that doesn’t necessarily mean that
all should be given a pass for complete stupidity; when nobody is
being killed in graphic ways, Demons manages to get tiresome pretty quickly,
and the predictability of its plot, and long, rambling ending, certainly
don't do it any favors.
RECAP: Well, my teenaged memories of this movie didn’t quite
live up to those of my 31-year-old self. Demons is awfully, terribly bad; thankfully, this actually works to
its advantage, at least early on in the film.
The dialogue is so completely inane, and the plot so terribly conceived,
that the movie almost manages to approach its own brand of genius. Then the characters get irreconcilably stupider
as the movie goes on (and the best character gets killed), and so it goes from
being entertaining, to just flat-out frustrating. The 90-minute run time feels more like two
hours as the ending drags on and on, long after making its point, only so it
can attempt one more (admittedly cleverly-timed) twist; but the payoff is not
worth the wait. The only legitimate
pluses: The special effects, from the gore sequences to the makeup on the
demons, are pretty darn good, and there are a couple of excellent sequences of
the monsters stalking their prey.
Overall though, I’d say it fell pretty far short of the mark for me.
RATING: 5/10
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