The first Demons was a gloriously insane little ride that was mostly about people spewing green stuff out of their mouths while heavy metal songs played over scenes of them all dying. This one is kind of like that, only without any of the things that made the first one good or even interesting. All the cool lighting and directing touches are gone, the music is less prominent and the kills are less interesting. Sound fun yet?
Director: Lamberto Bava
Starring: Bobby Rhodes, Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni, lots more
Co-written with Nathan.
I guess this is a sort of weird ‘movie within a movie’ where you think you’re watching a story about a bunch of kids trespassing in the ruins of the movie theater from the first Demons and waking up a demon – it's weird that all five of them can't take one demon that was just asleep a second ago. I guess not everyone can be Ash from Evil Dead! It's just that these guys are like baby kittens completely helpless in the world. Pathetic, really.
This all turns out, confusingly, to be a movie within a movie, watched by a bunch of boring simpletons in this kind of weird hellscape of an apartment building. The entire movie pretty much takes place here, inside this giant Kafka-esque block of an apartment. It’s kind of a strange, claustrophobic setting that could’ve been effective if they’d known what they were doing. But it doesn’t seem like much more than an excuse not to spend money filming in actually interesting locations.
Instead, you mostly just get scenes that play like something out of a bad comedy. Like, this one girl is having a huge birthday party and locks herself in her room in the middle of it and watches the Demons movie. A demon starts coming out of the TV and, when it goes to static, she just tries to change the channel – shows how deep TV gets you. People get addicted to the shit enough to prefer it over preventing their own imminent death. The funny thing is, this movie is so bland that this isn’t even social commentary – it’s just another in the line of stupid, meaningless shit that happens.
The movie basically then becomes a lot of people turning into demons and killing people and stuff. It’s all a lot of noise – a lot of people who stand in place screaming as the demons kill them. It’s not really much of a challenge for the demons here, guys. You’re like easy pickings now. At least put up a little bit of a fight! It’s barely even a fucking horror movie if the characters just sit and wait to die. At that point it’s, what, just a dinner for the monsters? A potluck maybe?
They try and compensate for it by having the actors over-do all their scenes like they’re having epileptic seizures. That can be kind of funny at first, but after like an hour of just screaming, it’s like being in the middle of a bunch of cranky infants. Not really what I look for in a horror movie, guys!
There are various characters, but none who are really interesting. Oh man, tell me more about the gym guy who shouts at everybody to lift more weights! He’s such a compelling character I think my brain is gonna explode. William Faulkner and Alfred Hitchcock only could have DREAMED about a character this good.
Oh, the pregnant woman faces off against a small child turned into a demon – you have to be pretty weak to not be able to beat up a child. I know normally you wouldn’t want to, but this thing has mottled green skin and eyes like an inferno. Not sure the normal rules apply. It should be easy enough to defeat the kid but, by horror movie rules, the pregnant chick has a really hard time of it. Then a monster does an Alien-style chest burst out of the kid and out comes a tiny little goblin-like thing that looks like a shitty rubber McDonalds toy. Truly, what am I even fucking looking at with this?
I’ve been grasping at straws trying to talk about this, but it’s tough because there’s so much shit happening and all of it is so boring and inconsequential. There’s never a sense that anything in the story is moving forward. It’s all just random scenes, arranged arbitrarily, as if drawn from a hat and then slapped together. It’s as exciting as waiting in line at the DMV, but at least in that situation you have the ability to escape the screaming children there after less time than this movie’s runtime takes up.
I guess there’s some scenes of people in an elevator trying to hide from a demon, which are somehow more dull than if you were actually stuck in an elevator with someone in real life. And the climax is set in this underground parking lot, you know, the PRIME fucking location for ANY horror movie to be set in! My God! What a revelation, a climax so exciting that I will never enjoy any other movie again. Fuck any other cinema, this is the true zenith of all film creation!
I dunno, I really have nothing else to fucking add here. This is just a vapid, dull, awful movie and I would rather go watch the first one again.
Image copyright of its original owners, I don't own it.
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