Confession: I don't like Italian horror movies. I love Italian Westerns and Italian Neorealism was very important to cinema, but Italian horror movies really annoy me. They make no sense. And not just in a "oh, I'm a dumb American who cannot appreciate foreign art" way. I don't think anything is lost in translation. The plots are nonsense in any language. Sometimes they will have a creepy surreal quality like in Suspiria or Beyond the Door. Most of the time they feel like movies made-up as they went along.
Demons from 1985 is a pretty damn cool rock'n'roll horror flick. It is as cool as it is incoherent. If you like gore, rock music, and exactly one exposed nipple, here is a movie for you. If you like a plot that actually goes anywhere or explains anything, this will be really frustrating. I'm torn towards the latter.
At first Demons seems like it is going in an arty metafiction direction. Random people at a Berlin subway station are given free tickets to a horror movie. The guy handing out the tickets has an awesome SciFi Phantom of the Opera metal mask. When the audience gets to the theater, they see in the lobby a mannequin on a motorcycle holding a katana and a similar scary metal mask. (Really cool imagery.) The mask then appears in the movie they're watching, turning people into demons, who are basically zombies. Guess what? The audience starts turning into zombies too.
However, all these metafiction ideas are abandoned immediately by Demons. I was hoping this was going to be the Italian zombie House of Leaves. Instead our heroes turn off the movie within a movie. Then they spend the rest of the ninety minutes getting eaten by their zombie ex-friends. Now all of sudden Demons wants to be The Evil Dead. George (Urbano Barberini) is our local Italian Ash Williams. He grabs the katana and rides the motorcycle. He's riding all over the auditorium seats, swinging his blade left and right, hacking off zombie limbs, all while his new girl, Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) rides bitch. That part is cool as shit. Maybe don't watch Demons, but find that scene.
Then after that Demons is inexplicably a zombie apocalypse movie too. It only took a few hours but Berlin fell almost immediately to the undead. The ending is very sudden and brutal. I don't think Lamberto Bava intended for me to laugh at it.
Plot-wise, Demons is a fucking mess. There's a running group of coke-head side characters who take up twenty minutes of the movie's screentime but never contribute anything. We never find out who made the evil mask, who made the movie within a movie, who the guy in the mask is, or what the fuck any of this is. Nostradamus is involved somehow. There is a hot theater attendant lady (Nicoletta Elmi) who acts very sinister and briefly is turned-on by the mask. I thought she might be part of the bigger evil plan here, but nope. The zombies just eat her too. Italy, why? Why can't your horror movies make any sense? Where the fuck did the helicopter come from??
As for that "rock'n'roll" part. Demons has a Hell of a soundtrack. Most of the music is Eighties metal or punk. So if you want to listen to Billy Idol or Mötley Crüe while watching fairly decent practical gore effects, Demons is your movie. The main theme is a synth track that samples "In the Hall of the Mountain King". That's pretty hilarious.
Next time: A Return to Salem's Lot (1987)
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