Lucio Fulci only made two more films after Demonia and it makes you realize how much we lost when he died in 1996. Can you imagine how bad the movies would be if he were still alive and making them today?
Five hundred years ago in this monastery or nunnery or wherever it is that satanic nuns hang out, the townspeople get all uppity over their nuns misbehaving and running around with question marks painted on their foreheads so they nail all five of them up on crosses.
The amazing thing to me was that these scenes that took place in the secret basement of the monastery were always the best lit ones, whereas whenever the movie went outside, it looked like Lucio took his dirty handkerchief and shot scenes through that.
Five hundred years later in Toronto (the nuns lived in Sicily) we are at a séance and Liza has a flashback to these nuns for some reason. Was she trying to contact them? No, she couldn’t have known about them.
So maybe the nuns were trying to contact her, but why? Did the nuns know that she was about ready to fly over and go on her very first archaeological dig near their monastery? Is the movie already not making any sense?
Liza’s boss, Paul Evans, does what every good boss does and pooh poohs her Ouija board activities and generally patronizes the hell out of her. I immediately determined that I would see this one through, if only to see him get his eyes poked out or his brains squeezed out of his head. (He just got stabbed in the gut, so the movie even let me down in that department.)
The Shriek Show DVD has a text interview with the “star” of this film, Brett Halsey. Brett plays Paul and he talks about his “contributions” to the film and that it was all his idea to have the movie take place in Toronto at the beginning.
Then Brett lets it be known that it was also his big idea to wear this green Canadian jacket during the film. The thing about this jacket is that it’s one of those letter jackets that the cool kids in high school would wear, except that this one has the word “Canada” on the back and the letter on the jacket also features the word “Roots” inside the letter. Brett explains that Roots is some clothing store in Canada that is very important to him.
I’m sure they appreciate all the free publicity you got them in a horror movie that no one ever saw, but I think it’s vital that we remember that it is almost never a good idea for a middle-aged guy to be prancing around in a high school letter jacket.
When Brett isn’t posing in his way cool jacket and giving Fulci a bunch of other great ideas on how to really make the film succeed, he’s acting high and mighty with his crew and Liza. He seems to have two jobs on the dig: one is to tell the crew to quit singing and drinking and having fun, and the other is to tell Liza not to bother with these dead nuns because that’s not what they’re there to dig up!
Paul doesn’t believe Liza when she tells him about the neat stuff down in the secret basement, but she does encounter a woman who tells her that if she comes by her place that night she’ll fill all of us in on the horrific back-story that the townspeople are desperately trying to hide.
When Liza meets up with this woman, she spills her guts to her about the terrible history of the town. It’s the usual middle-ages-satanic-nun drill. These nuns love Satan, they have wild orgies (shown merely as a few nuns getting pumped by a few townspeople – pretty tame stuff as far as satanic orgies go), they kill their lovers and let their blood drain into goblets and they get preggers and dump the kid in a fire.
Fulci showed a lot of class with this scene, where we had the baby wrapped in a blanket and dumped in a fire and they let the dubbed crying go on and on as the fire consumes the kid. The best part was when we got a close shot of this baby’s chubby little arm moving a bit as it gets burned up. Awwwwww!
Once the townspeople figured out that these nuns were doing more than banging their husbands and brothers they formed an angry mob and crucified them all. Now, five hundred years later, they’re anxious to keep that a secret though no one really could explain why.
In any case, one of the nuns seems to possess Liza and people start getting killed, though it didn’t make much sense because sometimes they’d be killed by this phantom-type nun who was partly transparent and would fade away after doing the deed, so how could that have been Liza? The nun also killed snooping archeologists and protective townspeople alike without rhyme or reason.
I guess this nun is getting revenge. But her revenge is rather pointless and artlessly executed. Sometimes she does the killing herself and sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes she’ll even go to all the trouble to rig up some fancy contraption so that the film can have a big scene where a guy is ripped in half by a couple of ropes.
Of course, the film’s biggest problem is that the people put in jeopardy are barely names on a script and have no personality beyond just being descriptions such as gruff boss, possessed blonde, two drunks, crabby local butcher, and guy who got ripped in half.
The horrible technical work on this movie combined with the confusing story and the non-characters that inhabit it leave you with exactly the kind of movie you would expect where Brett Halsey provides his own wardrobe.
© 2011 MonsterHunter
