Review: Demons (1985)

Demons (Dèmoni) (1985)

Not rated

Score: 3 out of 5

Demons is as simple as it gets. It's directed by Lamberto Bava, son of the '60s/'70s Italian horror master Mario Bava, and its four screenwriters include one of the other icons of that period of Italian horror, Dario Argento. There's not really much more to it than that, except the junior Bava's sense of style elevating what's otherwise a very rote zombie movie plot whose only unique characteristics after the first half-hour are its movie theater setting and the supernatural origin of its zombies. Its first act was building to some interesting ideas, but once the bodies start hitting the floor, all of that is cast aside in favor of the kind of movie you've probably seen at least a dozen of already, without many twists barring a dark ending. What saves it is its stylistic creativity, as Bava goes balls-out with spectacular gore effects, crazy stuntwork, and a hell of a score supplied by the longtime Argento collaborator Claudio Simonetti of the progressive rock band Goblin, all of them coming together to create a distinctly '80s Euro-punk take on the zombie genre. I wouldn't say it holds together as a movie, but as a cinematic experience of the kind that Popcorn Frights supplied last week, it did not disappoint.

We start the film with a mysterious man in a metallic, Phantom-style half-mask wandering the streets of West Berlin handing out tickets to a film screening at a theater called the Metropol. A bunch of people show up, including the university students Cheryl and Kathy, the preppy young men George and Ken, a bickering married couple, a pimp named Tony and his prostitutes, and a blind man and his daughter who acts as his guide. Right away, the film drops a bunch of tantalizing hints as to what the real purpose of this engagement is. The lobby hosts a striking display of a samurai riding a dirt bike, holding a mask that later shows up in the movie that's being screened, a horror flick about a group of young friends who stumble upon the tomb of Nostradamus. A mysterious redheaded young woman in a green-and-white suit (played by Nicoletta Elmi, best known for playing creepy kids in '70s gialli) works as the theater's usher, serving as a creepy presence throughout the first act. And because one of the patrons decided to play around with that samurai's mask before the movie started, she gets possessed and turned into a monstrous zombie, who promptly attacks the other patrons and spreads this demonic possession to them. The moviegoers try to escape the theater, only to find every exit bricked up.

And that's about where the plot of this movie ends. No, really. Not long after the mayhem starts, the film loses interest in the plot and becomes a story about a bunch of thinly-sketched characters fighting for survival against a zombie horde in a movie theater. Cheryl and George are the only ones who get anything even close to resembling an actual arc, and even then, only in the sense that they're the ones who the film pegs early on as the final girl and boy. We never learn what the deal is with the usher, who vanishes into the background before she gets unceremoniously killed like so many other characters. We learn the "how" of the zombies early on, but not the "why", as we never see how it's connected to the movie the characters were watching beyond superficial details. There's a length subplot involving a group of punks who break into the theater (which seemingly lets them enter in ominous fashion) in order to escape the cops, which goes absolutely nowhere and exists only to explain what happens in the last five minutes. The masked man who invited everyone to the theater returns towards the end, but only as a one-note antagonist for the remaining survivors to fight. It's a movie where you can tell a whole bunch of people worked on the script, probably had a whole bunch of conflicting ideas on where to take it, and ultimately decided to not even bother, such that all the setup in the first act, and the hints as to what might really be going on, adds up to nothing. An intriguing mystery is completely squandered in favor of a movie that most of us have already seen many times before.

It's fortunate, then, that the rest of this movie was giving us everything while the script was giving us nothing. Watching this, you can tell right away where Bava's real interest was: zombie mayhem delivered in a very period Italian B-movie style that looked, sounded, and felt so damn good. Bava made great use of the theater setting as a closed circle for a zombie apocalypse, whether it's emphasizing the building's old-fashioned feel (they used the real Metropol theater in West Berlin for establishing shots) to lend a sense that it might have dark secrets lurking within its walls or having the survivors smartly turn the upper balcony into their holdout. The gore effects are gross, disgusting, and put on fine display, a combination of the demonic nature of the zombies from The Evil Dead (including a creepy glowing eye effect) and body horror straight out of a David Cronenberg movie. The human survivors, too, get in some good licks, especially a climatic battle in the theater where that dirt bike and katana out front are put to use. Their dialogue is obviously dubbed into English from Italian, but given everything else happening on screen, you barely even notice. And through it all, the soundtrack rocks on, with both contemporary punk and metal tunes and Claudio Simonetti's score together lending the movie a vibe akin to a music video where the plot doesn't seem to matter nearly as much as the killer images on screen. It's a film that felt like it had at least one foot planted squarely in the '80s counterculture, a zombie bloodbath where nothing happening on screen really matters but you're too busy grooving to a feature-length music video to really care.

The Bottom Line

Demons is a film that's as stylish as it is vacuous. Don't go in expecting an actual plot, characters worth caring about, or much in the way of sense. Do, however, go in expecting a fun thrill ride that never lets up once it gets going.