Demons (1985)
Another October, another few eyes to watch get gouged out . . . you know I do this for the love, don’t you?It’s not a healthy or sane love by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s all I got. And I’m doing this for YOU.Because you’re special. Or I am. I always get confused about which.
So anyways, now that we’re done with the foreplay, let’s dim the lights while I share a little something with you: Demons. From Italy with love!
How can you not trust a face like that?
Premise: 3/5
The general premise would be a shitload of people getting killed in a kinetic gorefest, but maybe you want more. I’ll give you a breakdown, but please remember, this is an Italian film we’re talking about, so it is often illogical and downright insane: a young student named Cheryl is being stalked through the subway system by a creepy guy dressed all in black—which wouldn’t be so surprising, I suppose, since this is Berlin and it is the ‘80s where bands that sound a lot like WASP with a dose of Motley Crue and Billy Idol rule the airwaves (and the movie soundtrack, coincidentally!). What makes this all-black-wearing renegade from the Cure particularly menacing, though, is the fact that half of his face seems to have a chrome mask welded to it. Naturally Cheryl gets a bit worked up over this, and seems to have finally lost her pursuer just in time for him to—BAM—bump right into her from around a pillar and then he . . . hands her a free ticket to the movies. Cheryl loves the cool promotion of the creepy half-mask dude after she realizes he’s not actually going to rape and murder her that she hits him up for another free ticket for her friend Kathy. They both decide to skip out on class that evening so they can go to the movie instead, although Kathy warns her that “it better not be a horror movie—if I have a heart attack, it’s all your fault!”
Outside of the neato promotion, nothing too weird yet, right? Well, except for the fact that nobody really knows where this theater is and have never heard of it before. And the fact that whoever’s in charge of the promotion neglected to give the name of the movie on the golden tickets they had El Creepo handing out. Just an address and the theater name “Metropol” and a time of the showing. When they do find the theater, it turns out to be a pretty big place, which makes it all the more surprising no one’s ever heard of it before. You see the motley crew (sorry, couldn’t resist!) filing into the theater: there’s the pimp with his hos, there’s the 2 single possible romances to match our 2 heroines, there’s the jerkface asshole and his shrew of a wife, the teen sweethearts, and the blind guy with his seeing-eye daughter (I think it’s his daughter anyway). Like lambs to the slaughter, they all settle into their seats as the lights go down and the nameless movie begins.
This is definitely one of the odder cinematic deaths I've seen. I *think* that the demon in the background threw the rope around their necks and was pulling it so hard their faces were pressed together and they died from a combination of suffocation and accidentally biting each other. Or something. Enjoy the pic anyway.
Now we get a few minutes of a rather cool movie-in-a-movie sequence. Whatever this movie everyone got free tickets to see was, it seems to be about a group of young folks riding their motorbikes into an ancient cemetery that just got uncovered due to an earthquake or something. However it was uncovered, the smarter of the two guys (two guys, two girls again) thinks this may be the cemetery where Nostradamus was buried.Turns out he was right, as they eventually find his coffin—weirdly enough, in this coffin there are no bones but just a strange mask and a moldy oldy book that prophecies the coming of the demons (“They will make cemeteries their cathedrals and the cities your tombs” is the dire pronouncement the smarter of the two guys in movie-movie-land is able to translate). If you guessed that this mask the movie-movie people found bears a striking similarity to the half-mask worn by the creepy guy at the beginning of the movie, you get a gold star.Back in the movie-movie, the dumber of the two male characters puts on the mask while the other is translating these warnings, and when the smart guy notices this he tells his dumb friend to take the thing off quick or else he’ll become an “agent of evil.” The dumber guy takes the mask off and plays it like a joke, since he sure doesn’t believe in any of that nonsense, but something on the inside of the mask does cut him as he takes it off.
But back to the movie-in-a-movie in a sec: earlier in the plot of Demons one of the pimp’s hos pulled a similar stunt while they were in the lobby of the theater—one of the promo displays for this movie they came to see is a life-size mannequin of a guy sitting on a motorbike with a samurai sword in one hand and a demon mask just like in the movie-movie in the other hand. She took the mask out of the mannequin’s hand and put it on herself, which did not amuse her pimp one bit, so he made her take it off quick, cutting herself in the process (I believe his response was, “That’s what you get for touching shit”). The ho gets a little freaked out by the cut she sees on screen, since its almost exactly the spot where she cut herself before, and just as that scene plays out, the cut reopens and starts bleeding again. She excuses herself and heads to the bathroom. Now the movie-movie and Demons run parallel for a while, as the dumb guy in the fake movie is next seen stabbing his smart friend repeatedly through the gut, while the pimp’s other ho goes to check on the one who never came back, only to get a whopping bit of her neck clawed off. And now, only about 15 or twenty minutes into the film, we can finally dispense with the plot altogether and get down to what the movie’s all about: death, chaos, and gore. Anyone killed by the titular demons (sorry, almost typed zombies—go figure!) will rise up later as a homicidal demon themselves, and we have a whole theater full of fodder to go through, whose problems are only compounded by the cokeheads that bust into the Metropol later to escape the police and foolishly open every door they see. Things do not go well for anyone involved.
Do I really need to say anything here other than "Italy"?
Cast: 3/5
Man, there are a LOT of people in this movie. Nobody’s really all that good, and most of the characters’ names I can’t even remember, since there’s so many of them and so many of them die so quickly (OMG spoilerz!). The pimp (Tony) played by Billy Rhodes kinda stands out as not good, really, but kinda funny—it’s fun seeing this sleazy asshole taking charge of the situation with his no bullshit attitude. Pretty much everyone else is just there to get chewed, clawed, hung, stabbed, scalped, and what have you. But on the other hand, I didn’t really feel the need to smack the shit out of any of them, and compared to some of the movies I’ve seen, that’s quite a blessing.
"The People You Only Wish Were Under the Stairs."
Technical: 4/5
Holy shit this movie has a wild soundtrack! I’m not even kidding about the Motley Crue and Billy Idol I mentioned above, they even have The Scorpions in there for good measure, I guess! There’s also some bands I don’t really know, like Rick Springfield, Accept, Saxon, Pretty Maids, and Go West, but I’ve heard of all of them.But when it’s not that stuff blazing through action scenes, it’s this sharp keyboard jangly synthy stuff that Dario Argento loves using to great effect—it sounds so dark but bizarre that I can’t help but be put in a weird headspace when I hear it. Thumbs up for the music in this movie, even the cheesy stuff!
And the gore? Holy shit x2! Granted it wouldn’t hold up too well nowadays, but back then on the small budget they had, it’s really impressive what they managed to pull off, and how saturated in blood and gooey bits the whole movie is. They were REALLY having fun in their gore shop, and pass the awesome on to you. The half-mask effect I mentioned above is just flat-out cool, there’s the grody (but not unexpected!) eye-gouging, plus someone getting scalped by a demon claw in real time!
And the way the movie is shot is no slouch either. You’ll forgive me if I can’t rave about it like the other stuff, but I can honestly tell you this is a good-looking movie with some really evocative scene layouts. After the first ho dices up the second ho’s neck, the second ho runs like hell (a natural reaction, I think) but gets lost in the theater corridors, just her wandering through the maze of billowing curtains has a certain quality about it that—I’m not sure why—just seems to make it more haunting and scary in a way. She’s like a lost little girl, and her screams for help go unnoticed because the rest of the crowd thinks its just part of the movie. Also for some reason especially cool was a scene shortly after that where the crowd finally realizes the horror in the theater isn’t just the movie anymore, so they all bumrush the lobby and try to break out into the street, only to find that the doors they just came through open on . . . nothing but a brick wall. Incredibly cool stuff.
This scene has everything you could want in a movie: motorcycle, sword, demons, and chick with boobs. More movies need this.
Popcorn Factor: 5/5
Well, this is either a 5/5 or a 0/5, depending on how prone you are to barfing up same popcorn when this movie starts dropping the splatteramma hamma down. Once this movie gets started, it doesn’t let up until after the end credits finish rolling. I really dig the meta-ness of the first act, I think it’s a very cool concept that gets you thinking (at the very least, it shows that some real thought went into setting this movie apart from the mainstream). Equally, though, I don’t mind when that concept vanishes after setting all the pieces in place for the wild horrorcoaster ride that follows. I would say this movie isn’t for the squeamish, especially if gore or hideous ‘80’s fashions are big turnoffs for you—but if you can get past all that, this is one fun flick!