Lamberto Bava's 'Demons'

For me, the 80’s was one of the most boisterous and fun times for horror films. One of my favorites, hailing  from 1985, is Lamberto Bava’s ‘Demons.’ Italian horror maestro Dario Argento, attached as producer, wanted to bring a hit to the states. He worked as producer on Dawn of the Dead a few years earlier, and got a taste for success in the U.S, but wanted a full fledged Italian production to do the same. Since it’s release, Demons has become a cult horror favorite packed full of everything the genre nerd lusts after. Cheesy acting, simple but entertaining plot, demons with sharp teeth, and claws that ooze green slime from their mouths, and plenty of gore in the midst of a blaring 80’s metal soundtrack. In my eyes, the plot is a predecessor to Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, except instead of taking place in a strip club, it’s in a movie theatre, and obviously, instead of vampires, we get demons.

It begins with a girl who gets a ticket for a mysterious new movie coming out by a masked stranger. Curious, she cuts class, makes her way to the theater with a friend, and we are introduced to a number of characters. These include a trash talking pimp, his two ‘hoes,’ a blind man and his daughter, and a surly man with an inept wife. One of the prostitutes places a prop mask over her face in the lobby, and cuts herself with it, foreboding the madness to come. The movie starts, and we begin to notice it’s a parallel to the reality we see going on in the theater. A man is cut on the face in the film, and we see the prostitute’s face start to bleed as well. The demonic possession ensues and the hysteria begins.

The plot sounds as atrocious as the acting is, but who needs a good plot or acting if you’re a genre fan and are just looking for an entertaining ride. And entertaining it is…this is a fun film, period. We have a trash talking pimp, coked out Berlin street punks, bursting, oozing green boils, a horrid demon transformation scene with growing teeth and claws, a demon baby ripping through a woman’s back, and a final scene that has to do with a samurai sword and a dirt bike that's sure to leave you smiling. What more could you ask for from a genre that has turned the banal, insipid films such as Paranormal Activity, and Saw onto the mainstream; over the quondam, nostalgic horror films such as ‘Demons.’ If you’ve been searching for an entertaining, gory, boil bursting ride, search no further, for ’Demons’ is a horror movie for the true genre fan.