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Director: Lamberto Bava
Year: 1985
Rating: UR
Running Time: 1 hour, 26 minutes
A woman named Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) is given free tickets to a movie screening by a strange looking man. Cheryl convinces her friend Kathy (Paola Cazzo) to skip class and see the film with her instead. The screening is being held at an old theater that has been restored called the Metropol. At the theater, they meet a pair of guys named George (Urbano Barberini) and Ken (Karl Zinny), who give them a hand with the vending machine. There is an art piece in the lobby with a metal devil mask. As a joke, one of the moviegoers named Rosemary (Geretta Geretta) puts it on, but the mask scratches her face. As the movie starts to run, much to Kathy's chagrin, it's a horror film about an evil mask that turns people into demons after it scratches the wearer's face. Just then, Rosemary realizes that the scratch she received from the mask starts bleeding. She heads to the bathroom to clean up, but the scratch starts to swell, pus, and before she knows it, Rosemary has transformed into a demon just like in the movie. Rosemary then goes on a rampage attacking other moviegoers and turning them to demons. Cheryl, Kathy, George, and Ken team up with other the moviegoers in the theater to try and survive and find a way out before they are killed or transformed to demons themselves.
"Demons" is an Italian horror film written and produced by horror legend Dario Argento. BigJ has seen quite a few of his movies, but me, not so much. Luckily, this one is filled with blood, guts, pus, slime, and gore and is actually pretty nasty to look at at times. It has a simple enough story about panicked people trapped in a theater full of demons and trying to do their best to survive. There is a slow build up until the first demon arrives, and I actually got the sense that it was going to be pretty boring with how long it took to get to the first action scene. When all hell breaks loose and chaos ensues, then the film picks up quite a bit. Demons don't typically spill green ooze from their mouths, do they? Or have pus bubbles burst from their faces? Or have blood dripping from freshly grown claws and newly formed fangs that push out old human teeth? Can you get a sense of just how icky that is!? The makeup work is both really good and highly detailed and simultaneously sort of cheesy, as if corners were cut in some areas of the effects work. As with almost all Italian horror films, there is some bad audio looping and the dialogue is obviously dubbed most of the time, but we didn't find this distracting and it actually added to some of the movie's camp factor. One of the other best parts of this movie was its bitchin' soundtrack. It's a great mix of techo-synth-pop and heavy metal, which also adds some much needed flair as people are running from the murderous demons, and also manages to liven up the entire movie. Overall, this was an unexpected treat after a couple of mediocre films in the last few days. Catch this one if you are a fan of Argento-fueled films.
BigJ's Rating: 7.5/10
IMDB's Rating: 6.6/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 56%
Do we recommend this movie: Sure, why not?
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One year ago, we were watching: "A Bay of Blood"
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