MonsterHunter

Umberto Lenzi’s Black Demons is notable because it’s a zombie movie where even the zombies can’t act. When you think about it, that’s really a hard thing to accomplish. I mean, how hard is it to shamble around with glop dripping off your face while some ugly, no-name starlet is tripping over some imaginary tree stump in the front yard of her isolated Brazilian villa? For the six guys they pulled out of the mission and dressed up in fake eyeballs, it turned out to be nigh impossible.

Six guys? Oh yeah, this is one zombie flick where you’ve got six of the undead trying to kill six different people. You see this isn’t your typical zombie deal where a meteor landed on the heads of some corpses or a secret government nerve agent got tipped over in a graveyard. These zombies have been brought back to un-life through the machinations of a headache-inducing voodoo ritual that involved a lot people gyrating around and playing the drums.

Once back, they seek revenge for their own death a century ago. As it was so clumsily explained through some dull exposition, they were slaves who tried to rebel, but got blinded and hanged. Now they are looking for six white people to kill to even the score. Just to give you an idea of what sort of movie we’re dealing with here, we hear about one of the six deaths over the radio. Just to really give you an idea of what sort of movie we’re dealing with here, we are actually glad to hear that breaking news bulletin because it interrupts a hideous pop song about breaking the chains of love (see the slaves-zombies wear these chains and…ugh).

The zombies are really only a minor bit of the trouble as it relates to the general quality of the film though. This movie comes across as a “bad acting derby” as soon as it starts when we meet our three main characters, Kevin, Jessica, and the unfortunately named Dick. The funniest bits in the movie were whenever someone was looking for Dick and had to yell over and over “Dick! Dick! Has anyone seen Dick?” The best one though had to be when Kevin and Jessie had all their stuff packed but couldn’t locate Dick. Kevin says, “I see his bag, but I don’t see Dick.” Keep looking, big fella, just keep looking.

The first thing you notice about these three is their looks. Kevin is apparently an English guy who has feathered hair and looks like a Italian horror version of Ted McGinley. I kept expecting him to pull a prank on Booger or something. Dick is a repulsive skinny guy who dresses in that late eighties style that involves brand new blue jeans, a royal blue Izod tucked into his dungarees and a short white jacket only a preppie sissy boy would ever be caught dead in. He spends his time pouting about how they are running around Brazil like regular old tourists, instead of hooking up with black magic priests and voodoo witch doctors and stuff.

His half-sister (I have no idea why that was a plot element, but they actually used vital dialogue time to explain that they had different fathers or different mothers or were illegitimate twins or something) Jessica is far and away the single worst performer in the movie (or in any movie for that matter) and utters her lines with all the nuance of a Speak-N-Spell. Don’t get me wrong here - everyone in this movie is going all out as far as embarrassing themselves, but this woman is so bad, you’re tempted to say that she has a gift.

She gets most of her competition from the two hikers they run into after Kevin drives their jeep into a rut that he practically had to swerve to run into. Jose and Sonia are renting the old haunted villa up the street where the slaves were hanged years ago and offer their hospitality to our threesome so that they have someplace spooky to spend the night.

You know, after typing the above, I was thinking that the trouble the jeep was experiencing could have been a distributor cap and that the wrecking of the jeep might have happened later. This jeep seemed to be getting wrecked, stalled, pushed, carjacked, and cussed every time these three boobs got anywhere near it. There was also an incident where Dick went all crazy and stabbed Jose in the neck and then slashed all the tires, but that was separate from the time when Kevin got the jeep’s distributor cap fixed and Dick tested it out by trying to run over Kevin. Kevin showed what a cool guy he was though by shrugging it off as probably just Dick’s foot slipping off the clutch or something. What is this Dick guy? Ninety years old?

Big Kev knows that in order to keep getting that ugly Jessica booty, he’s going to have to look the other way on a lot Dick’s crazy antics. Did I mention that what was even worse than Jessica’s acting was her white trash looks? I thought I was watching Tonya Harding’s homely sister whenever this hussy was prancing around in her unflattering jean skirts and even less flattering jeans. I thought the whole point of casting actresses that couldn’t act in your horror movies was because they were good looking. Luckily, all is revealed to us in the interview included on the DVD with Lenzi which we’ll discuss shortly.

In any event, Dick has gone and gotten himself an audio tape of this voodoo ceremony he went to the night before and once he’s at the cursed villa (I call all deserted country houses in Italian horror movies villas, even if they are located in Brazil, just like I call all caves in Italian horror movies, grottos) he gets bored and decides to relax by listening to some good old fashioned Macumba music. I don’t really have any idea what a Macumba is. I kind of thought it was some type of giant alligator, but I don’t remember any zombie gators in this one, so I must have been mistaken.

At the haunted villa there is a mysterious housekeeper named Maria who gives Dick the evil eye because he smells like Macumba. The most mysterious thing to me about Maria was how she kept her job as housekeeper since there was this big tarantula crawling around on the living room wall, but maybe that was one of her familiars. You see, when Maria isn’t not cleaning the house, she’s in her room chanting around her candles and stabbing her voodoo doll made out of straw or corn husks like it represented her agent or somebody who similarly shoved it up her ass in life.

Dick heads out to the graveyard full of executed slaves that’s in the backyard and plays his favorite Macumba tune and it somehow has the effect of turning on the fog machine that Umberto borrowed from Lucio Fulci. Then all the graves (and by all, I of course mean six) open up and the slaves come out and wander around. They all still have chains on their feet and each of them sports a particular weapon.

One has a knife, one an axe, one has a hook, and so on. I have no idea where they got these things since I find it difficult to believe they were buried with them. Vengeful slaves re-animated by a scrawny white Dick, I believe, but the mysterious origins of their weapons? Not buying it.

The zombies in this one aren’t terribly impressive and for some reason they sneak around like some kind of slasher, even though their chains make a ridiculous clanging noise even as they get dragged across the grass. There’s even a few moments where you’ll giggle as you catch the facial expressions of these zombies and they seem to be saying, “Uh oh! I think they almost saw me! I better slip out of sight!”

Everything ends when Kevin announces that the only way to defeat the undead is by fire. How he knew this (especially since he and his posse spent the bulk of the movie babbling about how it was almost the twenty-first century and they didn’t believe in revenge-seeking-slave-zombies) I don’t know, but I’m sure glad he did. Kev made a bunch of magical Molotov cocktails and heaved them at the zombies. I say that they were magical because even though they might land six feet in front of the zombie, they still managed to explode with a thunderous boom and engulf the zombie in flame. One time, the cocktail even managed to explode several times!

Like Shriek Show’s Zombie 4: After Death, the interview of the director alone makes the DVD a must have. Lenzi (Ghosthouse, The House Of Witchcraft) admits that Black Demons didn’t really turn out as great as he would have hoped and he spends much of the interview complaining that everyone in the movie sucked except Dick!

He called the guy who played Big Kev a “fool”, but reserved his harshest comments for the gal that played Jessica. She was a last minute replacement for someone good looking that could act and Lenzi says that in addition to being a “mediocre” actress, Jessica was “short and unattractive”. If that wasn’t good enough he follows it up with a story about she had personal problems on the set that stemmed from drinking milk that wasn’t pasteurized. She got so sick, they all thought she had AIDS! Oh and Dick and Kev didn’t even like each other either!

© 2008 MonsterHunter