Demonia (1990)
We continue our tour through the later portions of Lucio Fulci's career (see also Aenigma, Sodoma's Ghost and Zombi 3 for example) which is probably comparable to the tour you get from a colonoscopy, at least in the sense that you're having something stuck up your butt. Lucio only made two more films after this one and I realize now how much we lost when he went and croaked on us 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 seance and this blonde chick has a flashback to these nuns for some reason. Was she trying to contact them? Uh, 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 archeological dig near their monastery? God, does anyone really care?
This blonde girl is named Liza and I'm not sure how to put this delicately, but she stinks. Her facial expressions range from frowning to pouting to frowning again. She turned it up a notch once when she was down in the monastery and her boss surprised her. I distinctly remember that she went from frowning to bugging her eyes out then back to frowning again. Good stuff, just like they teach you in acting class at the community college. I really felt like her eyes were bugging out when I saw them bugging out.
Liza's boss is named Malcom Evans, but for some reason during the entire movie I thought she was calling him Paul. It was probably just a crucified nun trying to contact me in an attempt to warn me away from all of this. Oh, why didn't I listen to you, you satanic nun? Her boss 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.)
Shriek Show has a text interview with the "star" of this film, Brett Halsey. Brett plays Malcom (better known to me as Paul) and appeared in a bunch of Fulci's later movies (an odd claim to fame to be sure), but this guy talks about his "contributions" to the film and it was all his idea to have the movie take place in Toronto at the beginning. Wow! Cool idea! I can't believe Fulci didn't dream that up! If it was up to Lucio, he probably just would have had it all go down at a girls' school in Boston or something.
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. Well, I'm sure they appreciate all the free pub 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. You're just embarrassing yourself and your family.
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!
Malcom 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. I also would add that Liza first encounters this woman in the Hall of Records. Lucio always has to have a scene in a Hall of Records where people find out scary stuff like the blueprints for some house were changed (The Beyond) or that some guy named Dr. Freudstein once lived in a house by the cemetery or something like that.
So what did Liza find this time? Beats me. I can't remember, but I figured I'd get the lowdown from this woman later on when Liza went to visit her so I didn't sweat it all that much. 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. Lucio 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 this is one of those deals that seems kind of dumb because you've got people that are in their twenties and they're so up on all this history that they get really mad when Liza starts nosing around. Who cares? I don't care what happened in my trailer park last night, this is five centuries ago!
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. I never quite figured out how it was decided who croaked other than Lucio knew he needed a few gore scenes to trick the dummies in the crowd into thinking they were watching an entertaining film, instead of confusing and nonsensical claptrap. Quick! Get me Brett Halsey! See if he has any more wardrobe ideas to dress this dog up!
The movie slogs along through a series of scenes that make little narrative sense and that don't move the story along. You've got the scene where some cop and Malcom are talking about how Malcom is a suspect in a harpoon murder because of something that happened between him and the victim years ago and the cop keeps talking about how he learned all his investigative techniques of what to do and what not to do from detective novels and I'm thinking that this is a big waste of time, because we know Malcom didn't do it. The point of the movie isn't to unmask a killer, it's to see if this killer nun can be stopped and whether Liza can be saved.
You've also got scenes where Fulci investigates the death of a butcher, where the woman that gave Liza the information has her eyes clawed out by her own cats, and where two archeologists fall onto a bunch of spikes to their deaths. What is the point of all of this? There's never any explanation about anything that is going on.
I guess Lucio is leaving it up to me to assume that Liza is possessed by this nun and she's getting revenge. But her revenge is rather pointless and artlessly executed. Sometimes she does the killing herself (the butcher) and sometimes she doesn't (the cat attack). Sometimes she'll even go to all the trouble to rig up some fancy contraption so that Lucio can have the big scene where a guy is ripped in half by a couple of ropes.
Of course, Lucio's biggest problem is that the people he puts 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.