DARGIO ARGENTO PRESENTS LAMBERTO BAVA'S HORROR 'DEMONS'

Title: DEMONS from DEMONI Year: 1985 Rating: ***1/2

It's a shame when, after thirty-minutes, when an audience watching a violent slasher-horror picture begin dying inside the theater... practically right alongside the movie playing on the screen... one of the bloody victims tells the frenzied and confused group, who were beginning to figure out this premise on their own, "It's not the movie, it's the theater..."

Because producer Dargio Argento's DEMONS directed by fellow Italian genre-auteur Lamberto Bava goes from this highly creative meta premise into a fight-or-die DAWN OF THE DEAD retread, inside a theater instead of a mall... including a resiliently cool black dude leader...

Bobby Rhodes in DEMONS aka DEMONI

Who only leads for a little while, while his girlfriend makes for the most cunning of the titular zombie-creatures... leaving the mantle for  heroic white guy Urbano Barberini, as normal and subtle as they come...

But it's who he hooks up that the audience is responding to, since the first ten minute setup has an obvious (perhaps) Final Girl in a subway, being stalked by a creepy masked-guy... and Natasha Hovey (along with more temperamental Paola Cozzo) surely looks the part of sexy male-fantasy horror chick...

Urbano Barberini and Natasha Hovey in DEMONS

It's just that none of the would-be survivors, fighting like mad not to be slashed or bitten, to turn into the zombies they're trying to escape from, are all that involving (even when reanimated) for the audience to entirely care about or root for... what works best in DEMONS/DEMONI is what drives most Italian b-movies, and that's the creative camerawork and direction...

The practical effects are also great, obviously competing with the THE THING gross-out factor... of evil creatures bulging from gooey human flesh... and the tension guiding the practically non-stop action is also neatly timed: making DEMONS one of those flowing arthouse horrors you could watch with the sound off...

Urbano Barberini in DEMONS

Although you'd miss out on what are randomly misplaced American heavy metal/hard rock tracks, from Motely Crue to Bill Idol to Saxon... although Accept's Fast As A Shark orchestrating Urbano riding a motorcycle (inside the theater) while massacring zombies could have been the greatest music video ever (an obvious inspiration for Peter Jackson's DEAD-ALIVE lawnmower sequence)...

It's just that, in what's ultimately another horror pitting humans against monsters, there needed more build-up into the individual personality traits (also including an outside group of thugs highlighted by wild yet vulnerable punk girl Bettina Ciampolini and last-minute sharp-shooting blonde Emanuela Zicosky) for their possible survival to mean more than their inevitable/individual demise.

Bettina Ciampolini in DEMONS

Natasha Hovey in DEMONS aka DEMONI

Natasha Hovey in DEMONS aka DEMONI

Natasha Hovey in DEMONS aka DEMONI with Michele Soavi

Paola Cozzo in DEMONS

Urbano Barberini in DEMONS with Karl Zinny

From DEMONS

Nicoletta Elmi in DEMONS

Emanuela Zicosky in DEMONS aka DEMONI

Emanuela Zicosky in DEMONS aka DEMONI

Urbano Barberini in DEMONS

From DEMONS aka DEMONI

Urbano Barberini and Natasha Hovey in DEMONS with Karl Zinny

Emanuela Zicosky in DEMONS aka DEMONI

Emanuela Zicosky in DEMONS aka DEMONI

Bettina Ciampolini in DEMONS

Bettina Ciampolini in DEMONS

Bettina Ciampolini in DEMONS

Bettina Ciampolini in DEMONS

Bettina Ciampolini in DEMONS

From DEMONS