‘I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s the movie that’s making this happen…’
The idea of a ‘good’ film is a strange one. Demons isn’t particularly well acted. Much of the camera work and editing is shoddy. The score is jarring. The plot often baffling. The characters interchangeable. And yet… it’s utterly tremendous…
We open with a pair of young women being offered a pair of cinema tickets to a mysterious film showing at Berlin’s iconic Metropol theatre. Sidenote – if a strange man offers you tickets to something on the subway, it is probably best to ignore that man. Upon arrival, it becomes clear that the bizarre events depicted in the film-within-a-film are being echoed within the theatre itself.
This ingenious premise is part of what makes Demons so brutally effective. The claustrophobic, darkened setting instantly creates a sense of creeping dread that pervades right up until the film’s insane final sequence. The other thing that secures Lamberto Bava’s film status as a cult classic are the visceral and grotesque special effects. Think if The Evil Dead has been set in a movie theatre and featured ten times as much gore. The creatures here are like some ungodly mixture of the deaddites from the aforementioned Evil Dead franchise and the aliens from John Carpenter’s The Thing. Sergio Stivaletti’s special effects work really is a sight to behold – a heady mixture of make-up, prosthetics and animatronics that gives Demons a unique aesthetic and feel. It is no surprise that he worked with producer Dario Argento again on his own horror classic Opera.
Demons is quite unlike any horror film I’ve seen before. Utterly insane. Utterly unhinged. Utterly brilliant. I loved it.
