[film] "Demons 2" A Postview, copyright 1997 p-m agapow
Astonishly bad Italian horror flick in which a demonic infection spreads through the colourless inhabitants of an apartment block, causing them to underact, accquire poorly dubbed "Epic Theatre" voices and kill each other.
A definite "so bad it's good" movie, "Demons 2" is reminiscent of Frankenstein. The monster, not the movie that is, because it looks like it was stitched together from the remains of several dead productions and allowed to shamble about the soundstage for an hour and a half. Unfortunately "Demons 2" does not kill its creator and then get lost in the Artic, but you can't have everything. Scarily enough, this effort may actually have been assembled as a whole.
The prequel "Demons", for those who haven't seen it (and let's face it, who has?) concerns a film premiere at which the audience are transformed one-by-one into demons and kill each other. For this sequel, the action takes place instead in a (quelle surprise) condo. Common characters? None. Plot connections? None? Acting? None.
You have to give the director (who is the sole common link) some credit, because he has sucessfully shot a film in which no character's name can be remembered. Nada. You end up referring to them in elliptical ways. ("What happened to the black guy who looked like he was going to get eaten?" "He got eaten." "Oh.") However, he does have a talent for surreal plot twists. Ten minutes into the film, a group of partgoers usher their nerdish friend outside to deflect the crazy "Gerald" (maybe), who is going to crash their party.
Cue nerd waiting on street corner. Cue shots of Gerald driving at high speeds through town, laughing maniacally. ("Gerald, you're going too fast!" "Hahaha, I can handle it baby!") Cue first apartment dwelvers being torn apart by demons ... Nerd waits on street corner, looks left and right. Gerald laughs. The victims are trapped in the garage, ramming cars into the closed exit doors. Gerald shrugs off a request to slow down. Nerd waits. People get eaten. Gerald speeds. Repeat for next 80 minutes.
Finally, at the film's end, everyone is dead and the nerd is still waiting. He turns, gapes. In a screech of rubber, Gerald arrives, rolls and crashes his car and dies. The end. (Wipes tear from eye.) Ah, they don't make them like that anymore. Hell, they're not allowed to.
Did I say that was the end? Well, a man and a pregnant woman do manage to escape into an empty TV studio (perhaps in hope of starring in something else) and before you can say "Piero Pasolino", they're re-enacting the birth of Christ. It _is_ an Italian film. Guess the Romans are a little tense about mucking up the last divine birth, so they want to be sure not to miss the next one.
Hideous, but deliriously so. [0/bomb] and rap accordion on the Sid and Nancy scale. 3 Lamberts on the bad movie scale.
"Demons 2" Directed by Lamberto Bava. Starring David Knight, Nancy Brilly, Coralini Cataldi Tassoni, Asia Argento. Released 1987.
------ paul-michael agapow (agapow@latcs1.oz.au), La Trobe Uni, Infocalypse "There is no adventure, there is no romance, there is only trouble and desire." [archived at http://www.cs.latrobe.edu.au/~agapow/Postviews/]
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