Demons III: The Ogre (1988)
Let's get the obligatory explanation of where this fits in to the Demons mythos out of the way: it doesn't. It bears no relation to Demons, Demons 2 or Demons 4. I've never met anyone alive that has ever seen Demons 5 and as far as Demons 6 goes, I suppose this one bears a passing resemblance to it in that they are both hampered by inept female leads. Of course Demons 6 didn't have the star of House By The Cemetery backing her up like this one does! As Tom, this guy excels at slapping his wife Cheryl around and belittling her writing career and mental problems! And he's not even the ogre!
Like any relationship though, it's not all domestic abuse! There's also the good times like when they're cavorting around in a bubble bath while holidaying in a haunted Italian castle shunned by the locals! Oh, didn't I mention that this one involved a haunted Italian castle? You don't think ogres hang out in Manhattan penthouses do you?
As soon as the movie cranked up and we got past the standard "nightmare" prologue involving some little twerp mucking around in a spooky basement and running into something sinister and I saw Tom and Cheryl and their little boy in a car in the Italian countryside, I began flashbacking to any number of other Italian horror flicks. If it's one thing I've learned about Italy from all these movies, it's that they don't have Holiday Inns or Mariotts. They have haunted castles. And lots of them.
Cheryl is a famous horror novelist from America and she and her family have come to Italy where she'll spend her time working on her latest book and Tom and their son will wander around on hiking trips near the castle for the first half of the movie and then Tom will wander around the second half of the movie pooh-poohing his wife's complaints about being stalked by an ogre.
The locals are naturally a superstitious lot and are irritated that a bunch of outsiders are renting out the castle because of that ogre. Actually, I don't think anyone ever mentioned the ogre and the movie did an abominable job explaining the presence of the ogre, but if that was the only transgression committed by this one, we'd be forced to call it a raging success.
Predictably, any reason for the ogre to exist and what it's doing bothering Anne Rice isn't the only thing that is missing in this one. There's also the lack of suspense, action, attractive cast, good fashion sense, and a single original thought. Director Lamberto Bava does try to goose us in one scene when he has Cheryl menaced by a cow in the woods. I just pretended that it was the ogre in disguise.
Okay, it turns out that the little girl from the beginning of the movie is Cheryl. She has been having this nightmare for about twenty-five years where this ogre in this basement gets her. So what happens when they sack out at the haunted Italian castle? It has the exact same basement as her dream! Even down to having the exact same stuffed bear that she lost back in Oregon when she was just a little psycho!
Well, I don't think I need to tell you that the sensible thing would be to pack up the Cherokee Chief (They actually thank someone for providing it in the credits! The only other thing they thanked anyone for was the haunted castle!) and haul your haunted ass to the Milan Best Western. Well, I don't think I also need to tell you that these boobs stayed right there in that stupid haunted castle for the rest of the movie!
What is wrong with people like Lamberto and scripter Dardano Sacchetti and all their movies involving people being menaced by housebound threats that they fail to understand that common sense would dictate that the people being terrorized would probably be doing anything except staying in that house? I'm sure we've had this talk before, but if you're going to recycle the same story elements, at least recycle ones that make sense. Heck, if you were absolutely married to this idea (and if you were I would suggest a quickie divorce) you should at least come up with some device to explain why they stay.
But that wasn't the worst part of the way they set things up. As things go further along, it becomes clear that the things that Cheryl is writing in her novel are becoming true. She and Tom realize this and for some reason this causes them a great deal of stress. If this was happening to any of us though, it would be the best development we could have hoped for. Just whip out the yellow legal pad, the Dixon Ticonderoga, and start writing: "then the ogre decided that his life of bothering the vacation American family was an empty existence so he signed up for night classes at the community college, got his degree in electronics and began making good money." Problem solved, movie over.
At the very end of the movie, Tom does ask how Cheryl's book ended and she said something about how the hero saved the heroine after she killed the ogre, but if that was the case, then what was everyone doing running around hollering like they were all worried? And couldn't she have written her book so that she wasn't such a whiner and her husband wasn't such an insensitive clod?
The movie follows that age old pattern where Cheryl sees things that show us the ogre is milling around, but that always disappear whenever she drags Tom over to have a look. You've got your bodies in the basement, your pulsating cocoon with ogre coming out on the basement ceiling, your ogre hand prints in the flour (try some Tupperware and seal it up real good - that usually keeps the ogres out of it) and she frequently dozes off to have bad dreams that are supposed to trick us into thinking they are really happening, but since we're already in disbelief that this movie is happening in the first place the effect is rather limited.
What I admired about this movie is that somehow it managed to have so little going on, but also managed to explain virtually nothing about what was going on. Why is she having these nightmares? Why is all of this happening to her while she's at the castle? Why does the ogre have any interest in her in the first place? What was the point of the friendly local woman who may have been some sort of witch? And what about the crazy old guy named Dario who was painting the exact same cocoon with the hand coming out that Cheryl had seen in her dreams?
Apparently, the witch and Dario were familiar with the ogre somehow and the castle may have even been theirs at one point, but if the ogre had a beef with both of them, why didn't he just show up and eat them or what ever it is that ogres do? (And actually, as written by Cheryl, the ogre ends up trying to rip the clothes off the witch, but as Tom snidely told her, it all reeked of the fantasies of a sexually frustrated housewife.)
While most of the movie was spent watching filler like Tom and his kid getting lost while hiking, having a bug get caught in Cheryl's typewriter, and Tom and Cheryl having a slap fight in the kitchen, the best moments are reserved for when the ogre finally goes into action. The ogre is dressed in a ratty-looking Renaissance outfit and has hairy hands and a really ugly face whose chief distinguishing characteristic is its ability to shift the jaw from side to side.
Once the ogre is on the loose (due to some idiotic connection to orchids) Tom rapidly becomes a believer and whacks at the ogre with an axe. That doesn't do a whole lot, so he turns it up a notch and rolls a barrel full of wine at the ogre. It busts all over him and we gasp as we see the ogre covered in red wine! We all know that ogres go best with white wine!
The ogre is Cheryl's demon though, so it must be her that ultimately dispatches it. She revs up the Jeep Cherokee Chief and proceeds to run this ogre's butt over. Then she backs up and runs over it again. Then she drives over it again. By the time you're running over a stuffed ogre dummy for the third time, it really has lost its effectiveness. You also may question how fearsome an ogre is if it gets defeated by getting involved in a car accident. The ogre dies, disappears, and everyone hugs and makes up.
This is like an Italian buffet of horror movie ingredients with the haunted house, nightmares, person writing stuff that comes true, and stuffed animal that ends up with icky worms on it, and Lamberto isn't shy about filling up his plate with everything he can carry. The problem is that he loads up on the dull stuff and I suppose in a movie where the budget dictates that you have to feature the car you borrowed in the grand finale, you can't really expect that much, but I can't think of a movie where so little happened to so few characters!
Cheryl spends the entire movie moaning about her nightmares, Tom doesn't do anything other than get exasperated with her (obviously he's only staying with her because of the sweet vacations her book contracts get her) and someone needed to tell the ogre to look both ways before crossing the courtyard. Plodding doesn't begin to describe this one and it has to mark not only a new low in the Demons series, but also in Lamberto Bava movies. It makes you wonder whether the ogre didn't throw himself in front of the Jeep on purpose.