Demons (1985)

Director: Lamberto Bava
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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Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) (1975)

Director: Dario Argento
Writer(s): Argento and Bernardino Zapponi
Starring: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, and Gabriele Lavia

Dario Argento, much like Mario Bava before him, has always been a student of the “style over substance” school of thought; his movies, when at their best, are exercises in violent elegance.  Suspiria may very well be considered his swan song, the pinnacle of his talents as director, but Deep Red arguably finds him at the top of his game.  The deaths are certainly stylish, as can be expected, but those that are heading into it solely for the kill scenes might be a little let down:  In 126 minutes, there are only seven scenes of violence (about one every eighteen minutes), and only a couple of those are graphic. 

But whereas a slasher movie (or in this case, more accurately, a giallo film, which are essentially Italian slasher films, with a direct influence on the American versions) with few kill scenes is usually a recipe for dullness, Argento works at a fever pitch, throwing everything he has at the viewer.  The end result is a stunning work, and although I would stop short of calling it a horror masterpiece, it very well may be Argento’s masterpiece.

Marcus Daly is an English musician living in Italy (more specifically, as we will hear ten thousand times, a “pianist”) who witnesses the murder of a psychic.  He rushes to try to help her, but by the time he reaches her, she is dead.  A short while later, another person is killed, under very similar circumstances.  Obsessed with finding the identity of the murderer, and putting an end to the crimes, Marcus circumvents the police, and teams up with female reporter and part-time love interest Giana Brezzi (played by longtime Argento collaborator Daria Nicolodi) to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Of course, take away the names and this broad synopsis could describe any one of a thousand different movies (or novels, or plays, or…), but not many of them have the same impact that Deep Red does.  For every additional plot convolution—in typical mystery style, the constant uncovering of clues feels very arbitrary, rather than logical—Argento throws in another artistic decision that keeps us on our toes; the murderer plays the same children’s song before they murder, and also “warns” victims by hanging a plastic doll from a noose at the soon-to-be crime scene.  The little artistic flourishes that abound throughout keep us engrossed, especially in the many instances when its logic fails.

The constantly roaming camerawork is near legendary; from simple camera movements, or montages of dark interiors, Argento somehow manages to ratchet up the tension.  He successfully creates an atmosphere that almost every horror movie tries to replicate, but so few successfully manage; that evil could be hiding in any shadow, and can strike at any time.  This also has a lot to do with the lighting, especially during nighttime scenes, and Argento pulls off natural lighting with relative ease; we knew he could go over-the-top thanks to films like Suspiria, but his style here is more realistic and downplayed, without trading off any of its effectiveness.  Any budding film director, whether interested in the horror genre or not, would do well to study his compositions to get a true understanding of how to master the visual craft.

It should go without saying that another big part of cultivating the desired ambiance depends heavily on the score, and for Deep Red, Argento relies on Italian rock band Goblin, part of a frequent collaboration that would end with his release of Sleepless in 2000.  While their music in Deep Red is far from their best work (a couple tracks are very repetitive, and the same few are used over and over again), it nevertheless remains a breath of fresh air from the genre, even today.  Eschewing all the typical earmarks of a horror score—string swells to alert of incoming danger and sudden shrieks that signify jump scares or character revelations—Goblin’s work is uptempo rock.  This makes the kill scenes kinetic and almost adrenaline-pumping, giving them a “life”, so to speak, and a resonance that wouldn’t have been possible with a more dramatic, straightforward set of music. 

It’s not without its problems:  The writing is relatively standard, and just relies on piling one implausibility on top of another, while the acting is a moot point, given the dubbed Italian voices (although you can clearly see they are often speaking in English), so none of the performances have any kind of impact.  But for those that are more intrigued with the visual aspects of film, Deep Red has a lot to offer well beyond the genre’s trademark gore.

RECAP: Suspiria gets all the press, but Deep Red just may be Italian director Dario Argento’s best work; a visually-inventive giallo film that, what it lacks in substance (and it’s a lot), it certainly makes up for in style.  The camerawork and lighting are extraordinary, the blood scenes are well done, and there are some inspired artistic touches spread throughout that never allow it to be anything less than fascinating—for a slasher movie with only seven deaths that just surpasses the two-hour mark, that’s saying a lot.  It’s definitely not perfect:  The writing is standard, and the acting contributes nothing to the overall story (due in large part to the Italian cast speaking in English, only to be dubbed in Italian, somehow standard for these kinds of films).  But for those who don’t mind allowing the writing and characters to take a backseat to technical brilliance, then Deep Red just may be what you’re looking for.

SCORE: 8/10

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