Demons (1985)
I'm not sure what's scarier: the fact that Demons is often hailed as Lamberto Bava's masterpiece or the fact that Lamberto Bava has a masterpiece at all. Lamberto is the son of Italian legend Mario Bava and if nothing else, he should be recognized for not letting a lack of talent get in the way of his drive to make movies. Once his dad died, Lamberto was free to begin cranking out awful movies in earnest. So it was that we were witnesses to Monster Shark, A Blade In The Dark, and Delirium, all films that serve only to make us appreciate the relatively painless experience that Demons is.
That Demons is little Bava's most watchable film, shouldn't be taken to mean that it is a flawless endeavor, or even a really good one. Only that it keeps moving along fast enough and keeps you less bored than you would expect, chiefly through the use of lots of gory special effects and a soundtrack that features such artists as Motley Crue, Accept, and Saxon. I also heard Go West's We Close Our Eyes for the first time in years in this movie as well as the overly-familiar White Wedding by Billy Idol and realized that regardless of one's musical tastes, you can't deny that the franchise was at its peak the first go around as opposed to Demons 6, when they were using groups like White Lion and Bang Tango.
Thankfully, Lamberto doesn't waste a bunch of time setting the story up. It's a frigging demon invasion! What more do I need to know? There's no reason to suffer through much in the way of character development or dialogue that gives us pointless backstory for people that are just going to have their heads ripped off by demons in twenty-five minutes!
The set up merely consists of a strange guy in a half-mask of metal who gives some chick free passes to a movie theater in town and she and her friend go to the movie that night. What passes for bickering takes all of about thirty seconds and involves her friend whining that she hopes it isn't a horror movie. She obviously didn't realize that her free ticket was handed to her by Michele Soavi who made Dellamort Dellamore, The Church, and Stage Fright !
Once at the theater we see that several other people have shown up for the free showing and instead of us having to actually get to know them before the action starts, we are introduced to them via their actions as they watch the movie unfold before them up on screen. There's two guys that hit on our two gals and sit near them. There's a black guy in a white suit who is very loud and swears and is accompanied by his two hoochies. There's a crabby white guy who is there with his wife and who gets mad when people are yapping during the movie. There's a blind guy there with his daughter and she's busy getting felt up by some dude when she isn't having to explain to her dad what's happening on screen. Other than our two girls and two guys, none of these people even last long enough to check in with a name, so it was a wise move not to waste a bunch of time trying to pretend that these people were anything beyond bodies to attach special effects to.
In one of those surreal moments that you only get in bad Italian horror movies, the free movie that everyone is watching turns out to be a bad Italian horror movie! We've sort of seen this gimmick at least once before in Andrea Bianchi's Massacre , but that was a case of a giallo set on the movie set of a bad Italian horror movie. It's even more absurd in this case because the movie they're watching is something that you could have sworn that Lamberto or Lucio Fulci would have made for Italian TV late in their careers!
It involves a group of young people messing around in some tombs looking for Nostradamus' resting place, finding it, breaking a seal, and locating a book and a silver mask. This would be the same silver mask that was on display in the front of the movie theater! And the same silver mask that one of the hoochies put on and cut herself with!
In the movie that is being watched in our movie, one of the characters puts the mask on, cuts himself, and turns into a bloodthirsty demon. Needless to say, the same thing happens to the hoochie and once she turns into a full blown demon with claws and gooey face, it doesn't take some genius long to announce breathlessly that what's happening in the movie theater is what's happening in the movie!
Once the demon takes over the body of the first hoochie, the movie wastes little time in infecting everyone else the same way. In fact, everyone but our four heroes get it so fast that we have to introduce a group of four druggies who seek refuge from the police inside the theater! This gives us four more people that can be killed and also allows one of the infected people out of the theater and into the city, setting up the typically apocalyptic ending where the whole city has been overrun by the demons.
The movie follows a few people as they attempt to escape the onslaught, but the theater isn't letting anyone out and the doors disappear and even escaping into the air conditioning ducts doesn't help. I think we're to assume that whatever evil force is controlling the movie theater allowed the druggies inside, but also is able to keep people from leaving or else no one managed to find that particular door. People try to fend off the demons as best they can by barricading themselves in the balcony, but that doesn't last as the demons manage to infect people there as well.
Ultimately it comes down to our original gal and her new boyfriend against the rest of the moviegoers. There's a sequence that comes off much sillier than Lamberto surely intended as the guy hops on a motorcycle and grabs a samurai sword (both were being used as part of the theater decor for some reason) and starts motoring up and down the seats hacking and slashing his way through the demons that are running amok. He even manages to pick up his gal pal for some riding action before finally laying his bike down in a heap.
It doesn't really work, mainly because Lamberto just doesn't seem to know how to stage and photograph action like that effectively. His father could use lighting to set a mood and create atmosphere and could move the camera around a set, but Lamberto's efforts at using lighting (mainly red here) gives things a cheap and muddy look while the way he edits all the motorcycle action is so haphazard that you don't get the sort of rush you should from it. This guy is cruising around on a motorcycle with a sword and whacking monsters with it! This should be the coolest part of the movie! It just comes off as a disjointed.
Lamberto knows that before he loses you completely with his botched motorcycle scene, he can redeem himself by dropping a helicopter through the theater roof! The people inside the helicopter have been slaughtered and now we know that the demon invasion has spread to the outside world threatening civilization itself! And all because of a bad horror movie! The demons give that movie two big thumbs up your human ass!
The first rule of making watchable bad movies is followed pretty well by Lamberto in this one: keep things moving. The musical score with various heavy metal songs as well as some pulsating numbers by Claudio Simonetti, keep the viewer from dozing off and Lamberto wisely doesn't skimp on the splatter, providing a few eyebrow raising moments as liquid spews here and there and teeth and fingernails fall out now and again. Nothing makes any sense, but since when did all hell breaking loose need to be logical? As long as you've got icky-looking monsters trying to tear up and eat people and you've got people trying to stab and shoot the monsters, I'm willing to substantially suspend my disbelief.