As any regular readers might have guessed by now, I often pick up movies solely on the basis of a name or two that I recognise, the way the cover looks, or just the movie's tag line. This generally leads to a wide variety in the actual quality of the movies I end up watching. In the case of Demons, I saw the names Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava and thought, "Hey, what can go wrong?" As it turned out, very little, as this movie turned out to be one of the greatest pieces of gory 80s horror cheese I've ever seen.
Random people are given tickets to a special showing of a new film at a recently renovated cinema, the Metropol. These people include music students Cheryl and Kathy, two young men called George and Ken, a blind man and his guide/daughter, a pimp and two of his girls, and so on. The movie being shown is a particularly gory (although not too good) horror, and the audience's responses are mixed. Things start to go south, however, when one of the pimp's girls who had been playing around with a displayed prop earlier starts to transform - very messily - into a demon, who then sets upon the rest of the audience. People who are injured or killed by the demon become demons themselves, and soon the rapidly dwindling survivors have to fight to survive and to find a way out of the cinema, which has become mysteriously sealed up...
If you go into this movie expecting it to make any sense at all, you're going to go away disappointed. Demons revels in its over-the-topness and near-incomprehensibility. It's one of the very few films I've ever seen which has an actual deus ex machina near the climax of the film, and certainly the only one I've ever seen that has a case of Chekov's motorcycle and katana. It's clearly not meant to be taken seriously - or at least taken as seriously as any number of other 80s slashers. The characters are more characatures than anything as well, especially the iconic Tony the Pimp (I once saw a blog dedicated to him which just posted his lines from the movie, such an impression he made on the audience). But really, all the characters are stereotypes, and stereotypes of what the Italian filmmakers seemed to think Americans were like at that. Demons is quite clearly an Italian film (filmed in Germany) made to appeal and emulate the American horror movie market. One might think that would end up being quite jarring, but I think it adds to the whole high strangeness of the whole movie.
It's certainly front-loaded with big names in Italian ciname. There's Dario Argento, of course, who was the producer as well as involved in the screenplay along with Dardano Sacchetti; the director is Lamberto Bava, son of the great Mario Bava and known for a great many films himself; and the assistant director is Michele Soavi, who went on to direct great things like Stagefright himself afterwards. And the score is full of big names too - Rick Springfield, Nicky Sixx and Billy Idol, just to name a few. Quite honestly, I could watch the film for the music alone sometimes.
As I said above, however, it's not a film that sets out to make all that much sense, however. We talk about "suspension of disbelief" in fiction to say that, if a story can capture human interest enough, the audience will be willing to ignore the "implausibility of the narrative", and holy crap is there a lot of suspension of disbelief in Demons. From the twin ideas of demonic infection that start the whole thing off, to the arrival on the scene of the quartet of punks led by a Sylvester Stallone lookalike, to the film's climactic scenes (mentioned above), the film doesn't so much border on the fantastical as tap dance back and forth across the border and finish with a display of jazz hands. It's also a very "wet" film, full of gore - particularly in the demon transformation scenes, which are genuinely cringe-inducing due to how they're done. So if you're looking for a film that's fun for all the family this probably isn't it, unless your family happens to be the Sawyer family. But it is fun.
Final note: the all-American blond shotgun-toting child at the end? Why, that's Bob/Tommy, of The House By The Cemetary and Manhattan Baby infamy! Good to see he's finally got a decent dubbed voice, for his final film appearance...
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