Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Demons - 1985

This rock em sock em movie should be more well known.  I mean it.  Seriously.
Directed by Lamberto Bava, this is a fun, rowdy hour and a half of awesome effects, bizarre storylines, interesting characters, and general thrills and spills.  Not to sound cheesy, but it's a perfect 80's cult film for you to watch.

When a theater is playing a movie about demons, things start to take a weird turn when life imitates art.  This is one thing I love, a movie that has a movie inside of it!  But not like a real movie inside the movie, an additional fake movie they can play and then have the movie riff on, imitate, etc.  It's just so cool!

So life imitates art and suddenly the theater patrons watching this demon movie get shocked when one girl there runs off to the bathroom and...transforms into a demon!  YES!  Much like a zombie, apparently demons in this movie can create other demons by biting/killing humans, and then that human will arise as another demon.  Awesome.

So now we have multiple demons hunting some very idiotic movie goers in a theater.  And then, the door is locked.  And then, they can't find the emergency exit.  And then, the theater staff is gone!  This just gets cooler and cooler.  You have several interesting and well played characters, the strong macho guy who looks to be in control, the screaming scared women who flee and get nude at the drop of a hat, you have the wanna be dudes who try and be tough but are mostly just cannon fodder.

This movie hits all the wants you could have in a 80's demon movie:  lots of death and gore, amazing practical effects, super cheesy dialogue, and I haven't even mentioned the insane soundtrack!  Made up of insane guitar riffs and real rock songs, it's a fucking awesome soundtrack.  Plus, you got nudity, you got spookiness and general skin crawling feeling to it.  It reminds me of Dead/Alive with it's disregard to the real world yet you have that feeling it's so plausible in its own way.  Its own, over the top, nightmare-ish kind of reality where people have 8.6 gallons of blood in them and they like to smear it all over women's naked breasts.

I really did like this movie actually.  If only for the soundtrack, I just thought that was genius.  It's a film that knows its audience and it doesn't care about anything.  It just says you know, this is pure fucking entertainment.

It was followed by Demons 2, also directed by Lamberto Bava, but then oddly enough Demons 3: The Ogre is NOT a sequel to Demons 1 and 2, but rather another film takes that role, The Church, directed by Michele Soavi.  The "key factor" in all these movies is that in each of them, people are trapped in a place.  In 1 its the theater, 2 an apartment building, 3 well, a church.

This movie is a near perfect film.  For what it is, it accomplishes it's every goal and it's everything you'd want it to be.  Highly recommended.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Saw IV / Saw V - 2007/ 2008

 I'm going dual review because this series is not giving me a lot to say, and in fact I barely remember what happened in these films des...