Demons

Demons (1985) is an Italian horror film directed by Lamberta Bava with script by Dario Argento, among others.  The picture is convincingly nightmarish and fairly amusing.  But like many pictures of this sort it outwears its welcome and deteriorates into increasingly garish and unconvincing violence.  If you can tolerate this sort of thing, it's worth watching for its first hour -- the movie is only 89 minutes long, but still feels too long.

Demons is rudimentary, people playing caricatures and poorly at that, and would be more effective as a silent picture.  However, it has primitive power and, like many horror films, its surrealist edge cuts deeper, I think, than the more artistic, and conceptually sophisticated, surrealism in the art world. A very pretty wide-eyed girl, a kind of Keane waif, rides on a subway.  The passengers are all grotesque in  various ways.  Inexplicably, the girl is carrying a score for Bartok's Mikrokosmos.  (For some reason, the film takes place in Berlin, although the picture features all Italian actors and the interiors -- and the pictures is pretty much all interior -- were shot in Milan.)  Alone in the subway, the girl is stalked by a weird apparition, leather-clad punk who is wearing a kind Phantom of the Opera half-mask made of glittering metal.  The punk gives the girl a ticket to a movie premiering at the Metropol, a theater that no one has ever heard of.  The girl shyly asks for another ticket so she can go with her friend.  

The girls meet on the Kurfurstendamm and agree to skip "Mrs. Buckles' class" to attend the movie.  Why this should be necessary isn't clear to me, but the movie wants to suggest all sorts of transgression, even playing hooky from school.  The two Maedchen find the Metropol, a huge hulking pile of brick, windowless with a grim-looking facade and eerie red skies overhead.  About forty people are gathered for the premiere of a nameless film that the girls hope will not be a "horror' movie.  The folks in the audience are stereotypes of stereotypes -- there's a pimp with his two foxy whores, some Euro trash with heroin chic profiles, a haggard blind man with a younger woman who may be his wife (she turns out to be his daughter).  A couple of handsome young men hustle the two heroines.  A woman in a green dress with a vast pre-Raphaelite head of red hair takes tickets and prowls through the auditorium with a flashlight.  In the lobby, there's a masked figure, a mannequin mounted on a motorcycle.  The mannequin is holding in one hand a samurai sword -- a detail that pretty much lets the viewer write the climax to the film; in the other hand, the demon on the motorcycle is wielding a metallic demon-mask, a kind of Kabuki face all twisted with evil.  One of the whores puts on the mask which has a sharp edge that cuts her face.  Everyone sits down for the movie, a slasher picture in which teenagers invade a crypt in some kind of mist-enswirled castle.  In the crypt, the teenagers finds the grave of Nostradamus and an inscription that reads:  They will make cemeteries their cathedrals and tombs their cities."  The kids on-screen go mad and begin hacking each other to death with knives.  Meanwhile in the audience, the whore who cut her cheek goes into the toilet, turns into a monster, and begins killing people.  The murders have a vampire-aspect -- if you are slashed by a demon, you turn into one also.  Pretty soon just about everyone is dead or undead, since all the victims of the demons become ravening monsters themselves.  There's no way out of the movie theater -- the doors turn out to be all bricked-shut.  After the demons have killed everyone (except one couple), the film palls a bit and so has to import four more teenagers into the theater, junkies fleeing the cops who can get into the building that no one inside can escape.  The demons kill them expeditiously but, not before, the director has established some kind of specious equivalency to using cocaine and becoming a demon with red eyes, spewing neon-green and blue ichor, and grimacing through jaws slavering with gore.  The motorcycle gets revved-up and sword is wielded and all of the demons are slaughtered.  Then, the surviving boy and girl escape after a helicopter conveniently equipped with a big winch inexplicable crashes through the roof of the theater. The two survivors escape, impale the guy with the silver mask who is still wandering around, but, alas, the whole world is now overrun with bloodthirsty demon-zombies and things don't look too good for our heroes.

This nonsense is sub-literate.  The dialogue is laughably bad.  People tend to shout out what we have just seen graphically portrayed on the screen. But -- the film has some effectively moments.  There is a bad dream quality to the fact that no one can escape from the theater, that all corridors end in blind walls, and that even when you bust through a brick floor or ceiling, you find yourself enclosed in just another labyrinth full of monsters with hallways leading to dead ends.  (The best scene in the movie is a sinister fast track around the four walls of sort of brick cistern where the characters find themselves immured after laborious efforts to escape the hellish theater.)  The demons are fairly scary and the special effects have the muscular, syrupy look of pre-CGI horror -- it's all done with buckets of red goop and mannequins that can be torn apart in various ways; there's even some time-lapse photography showing well-maintained teeth falling out to be replaced by the rotting, grey and green dentition of the demons.  The film is completely derivative, featuring knock-offs of The Exorcist and Alien, including a hideous little demon who erupts from the back of a girl who has become the chrysalis for the miniature monster.  It's fun and creepy until it becomes tedious and the climax involving the motorcycle, samurai sword, and the horde of growling, blood-lusting demons is horribly mismanaged -- it's as if the director completely lost interest in the movie just at the point that called for his most dramatic and spectacular action scenes.  The setting in Berlin suggests some kind of historical allegory, but, I think, this interpretation is way beyond the film's very modest ambitions.  The scenes introducing the demons are quite good -- the parallels between the mayhem on the movie screen and in the audience are effectively managed.  It's as if the demons are being spawned in some way by the horror imagery on screen and, perhaps, the film would be a hoot if seen in a real auditorium in a big, old, and decrepit movie palace, a place, perhaps, as haunted as the theater on the screen.