Demons 2

Shock Block

Demons 2
aka Dèmoni 2... l'incubo ritorna
Italy 1986
Directed by Lamberto Bava
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Okay... this really is going to be a short review. When I revisited the first Demons on Blu Ray recently (reviewed here), as part of Arrow’s excellent double bill collection of the films, I was somewhat disappointed with it not living up to my memories of a better film. However, since I was very much let down by the sequel when I first saw it (20 or more years ago), I figured that my tastes may have changed and I’d maybe get more out of Demons 2 on a second look. Alas, I can confirm that Demons 2 is... well... it does still make the first film look pretty good. It’s a lousy sequel with not a whole lot going for it, it has to be said.

One of the nicer things about it is the concept. In the first movie we had the people in the first film in a cinema watching a horror story which suddenly became a parallel for the customers suddenly getting infected by a demon virus themselves. In this movie, it’s almost completely set within an apartment block, late one evening when most of the people living there are tuned into a similar horror movie on their TV. This one has a demon from the movie pushing itself out of the TV screen of one of the characters and infecting her, unleashing the demon virus into the tower block. And that’s that... another simple story of survival horror (or non-survival, as the case may be) and there’s not a heck of a lot of fun to be found in the various twists and turns.

There are a few nice things and points of interest I can briefly mention here though.

For example, the resurrection of the demon from a corpse in the movie within the movie is a simple effect but executed brilliantly so it looks great. There’s another nice special effect moments later where a dog is transformed into a demon and that’s not handled badly at all (perhaps inspired by the John Carpenter remake of The Thing, reviewed here, although obviously not in the same league). And talking about... ‘inspired by’... there’s a sequence where a demonic kid is running around chasing a pregnant woman but then he starts writhing around himself in a kind of parody of John Hurt’s character from A L I E N. Yep, there’s a chest burster parody here as the demon boy gives birth to... something not entirely unlike the title creatures of the movie Gremlins, to be honest. So two references for the price of one there. Plus, a nice moment when the bloody knife seen at the start of the movie turns out to be dripping with jam in a patisserie shop. A nice but minor piece of visual rug pulling.

There’s a lot of bad things in the movie too. There are a few actors back from the first one in different roles but, it has to be said that, in general the acting in this movie is not a high point. It’s also the film debut of a very young Asia Argento (she was around 11 years old when this film was released in cinemas) but she’s kind of wasted in this and doesn’t seem to do much at all... bizarrely dropping out of the fillm towards the end with no real clue for the audience as to her fate... as she hides in a car in the underground car park where a lot of the short lived survivors fight their last stand.

Added to this, there are a few moments at various intervals in the movie where it takes the parts that were practically unwatchable in the last film, a bunch of teens driving around the city very fast playing rock music... and repeats it with another bunch of unlikable teens who, this time around, don’t go anywhere close to catching up with the rest of the plot. In fact, there are quite a few scenes in this movie where it feels like other sequences were planned but then never shot. And goodness knows why two of the main exterior shots are completely out of focus. Why were they even left in the film? The budget obviously didn’t cover reshoots I guess.

Other than that, the only really good thing about the movie is the music. And I don’t mean the bunch of ‘hard to listen to’ pop songs which clutter up the soundtrack, especially when the teens are driving around the city. I’m talking about young, up and coming composer Simon Boswell’s score, which supports this mess of a movie when it can but, I can tell you that the CD soundtrack of his Demons 2 score is much more interesting as a stand alone listen. It’s a mostly different kind of vibe to Claudio Simonetti’s driven score to the first film. It does share some similar ‘orchestration’ of the electronics at certain points but it definitely sounds like Boswell’s distinctive musical signature on the score, for sure.

And that’s really all I’ve got to say on this one. Demons 2 is not a movie I would recommend to anyone. If you want to see a decent, virally violent group of people slicing and dicing their way through an apartment block then David Croneneberg’s Shivers (reviewed here) would be the film to watch. That one was made 11 years before Demons 2 but is a far superior movie and much more potent than this mess of a sequel, for sure. I know some people love this film but... yeah... this one is just not for me.

Beyond Darkness

Exorcise Regime

Beyond Darkness
aka La Casa 5
aka Evil Dead 5
Italy 1990 Directed by Claudio Fragasso
Severin Films Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: I guess this has spoilers.

Well, this will be a short review.

Okay... so I bought Beyond Darkness from Severin, mainly due to the fact that the film’s score by Carlo Maria Cordio was included on a separate bonus CD. Turns out though... that’s really only one of two things worth making this purchase for, the other being the special limited edition slipcase with the film’s more notorious and completely inaccurate alternate title of Evil Dead 5.

So the film has nothing to do with the much more famous Evil Dead franchise. However, the Italian title, La Casa 5 is also a direct reference to the Evil Dead movies (which were called La Casa movies in Italy) but, of course, none of these later films were continuations of those films... just a quick title to cash in on the success of the US franchise (so I really should watch those one day), much in the spirit of the gazillions of unofficial Django movies made in the wake of the original Franco Nero movie, most of which didn’t have a character called Django in them and were nothing to do with the first one.

So...  really wasn’t expecting all that much from this movie but I was expecting a much more fun time than I ultimately got. The film starts off with Father George (David Brandon) trying to read the last rights to a female serial killer on death row who says, basically, not to bother... I ate all the souls of the kids I killed and you’ll be joining me in hell soon. She also gives him a demonic bible and he now starts seeing hallucinations of her in his daily life. He then leaves the church world and becomes a drunken wino, who now sees things like the dead demonic lady driving the kids around town in a bus etc.

Meanwhile, Father Peter (Gene LeBrock), his wife Annie (Barbara Bingham) and their two sprogs have been moved into a possessed house with a portal to hell in the hopes that they can clear things up there (not that they find this out until demons from hell start turning up). It’s actually the same house in Louisiana that was used in Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (reviewed here) so, you know, you’d think they would have known something was amiss.

And not much else happens and, when I say not much, I actually mean quite a lot happens but it’s all so dull and plodding that I was finding it really hard to make my way through this one. I mean there’s a black swan rocking contraption with a life of its own, a doorway to hell which calls to the kids, zombie like creatures in black, diaphanous robes invading the house in a fog a few times, a kidnapped child and various quick possessions as people’s eyes glaze over with white contact lenses every now and again when they enter what I shall only call ‘the fog dimension’... and then Father George turns up to try and redeem himself and help Father Peter exorcise one of his own kids in what must be the most boring exorcism scene I’ve seen committed to film. And David Brandon is not subtle in his scenery chewing performance... which is probably how he’s been directed to be because, lets face it, the film is not too subtle either. He’s also the only one who seems to have a strong personality in this so at least he’s mostly watchable in an otherwise unbelievably dull film, it has to be said.

The cinematography comes through with a penchant for stressing verticality in the shot composition a lot of the time (very easy to do in the jail and interior house scenes and it’s emphasised a lot) and there’s a nice shot looking down at one of the characters through the spoked sections of a door arch at one point but... yeah, the cinematography doesn’t even come close to saving this picture, I’d have to say. It’s dull, dull, dull and when there is a nugget of interest where Father Peter’s daughter is left with the man in the local church and finger points to him being someone more sinister, the plot thread is not only not investigated but the daughter drops out of the picture unexpectedly. We never see her in the narrative again and everyone just seems to have forgotten about her, which is strange and makes me think there might have been more planned for this movie and maybe the budget or shooting schedule got sliced at some point, perhaps.

Carlo Maria Cordio’s score was, it turns out, worth the purchase and I shall be putting on the CD later today but, I’d have to say that, while it’s typical of the sort of synthesised disco horror scores of the time in Italian cinema, when everyone was trying to be Goblin and were mostly failing miserably, it does feel inappropriate to the movie and really doesn’t help it any. I can tell it’s going to be good away from the confines of the movie though so, at least there’s that.

And I really have nothing more to say on this one. I haven’t had time to watch the extras on this but, you know, it’s Severin so it’s a shoe in they’re going to have good extras and, probably, they’ll be a darn site more interesting than the actual film. All in all, it’s another good package from Severin but a really dreadful movie, as far as I’m concerned and nowhere near as good as similarly themed movies such as Beyond The Door (reviewed here). Sorry, I just can’t recommend this one, even to the friends who, like me, usually love clunky Italian horror movies. It’s just not good.

The Well

Went the day…

The Well
Directed by Federico Zampaglione
2023 Italy
Uncork’d Entertainment

I got fed up with waiting for The Well to get any kind of cinema release here in the UK. It’s now looking unlikely and, to further inflate the crimes against filmanity this movie is a victim of, it’s apparently due to be released in the near future on UK DVD, but not in a proper Blu Ray transfer... which a film which looks as exquisite as this one so obviously needs here. Why is this country becoming a bunch of philistines when we should be, like the French, a bunch of cineastes? 

So okay, yeah, I decided to watch a free, HD, pre-streaming version of the film, if you catch my drift. I mean, I want to buy a cinema ticket and a Blu Ray of this but, it’s like the company don’t want me to spend money on their movie. Absolutely crazy stuff. I can only hope that one of the proper boutique labels like Severin or Arrow or Vinegar Syndrome pick this one up in due course and give it the proper treatment it deserves.

Okay, so this film is, to all extents and purposes, made by someone who is definitely trying to make it look like a late 1970s/80s Italian horror film (even though it almost all takes place in 1993) and, frankly, succeeding in almost every way possible. Even the plot details have a very similar feel to lots of horror films and even gialli made in that period in Italy so, if you are a fan of that particular golden age, then you really do need to see this one.

The film stars Lauren LaVera as Lisa, sent by her father (who owns a company who restore artworks to their former glory), to a chateau in Italy, in order to restore a painting belonging to a woman called Emma (played by the great Claudia Gerini, who younger, modern audiences might best remember for her turns in the first off the new Diabolik movies, reviewed here and John Wick Chapter 2 reviewed here) and her freakish daughter. On the way there, she meets up with three Americans studying the flora and fauna of a nearby forest and they agree to meet up later that week… that meeting never really happens for reasons I won’t reveal.

When Lisa arrives at her destination, she discovers the huge painting is completely smoke black due to a recent fire… but she has to uncover what lies beneath in two weeks, due to reasons made very clear at the end of the story. However, as each day goes by and more of the demonic (because, of course) painting is brought to light, Lisa begins to encounter nightmarish visions along the way. Is the painting hiding a deeper, sinister secret? Well, yeah, absolutely.

That’s as much as I’m saying about the plot but, as you would expect from a film trying to emulate the Italian horror films of the 70s/80s, it looks absolutely beautiful and the camera moves through the shots in a very controlled and slow way. There’s a lovely shot, for example, where the camera slowly moves left past a birdcage in the foreground of the shot, removing the bars from the screen as the verticals exit on the right... then the rest of the scene plays out and then the camera exits the scene with the precise opposite movement, bringing the bars back into the front of the screen. Another great shot has Emma’s daughter constantly circling around Lisa and camera moving in a circle with her. And there’s a wonderful sequence where a room so neutral and colourless it looks like it’s in monotone, is suddenly contrasted with an orange/brown room which, when Lisa enters it, is pitched against the mono room which can be seen in the huge doorway she just came through. So, yeah, the film is lovingly crafted and absolutely has the feel of those cinematic delights it’s trying to emulate.

Not to mention the level of goriness in the movie… let’s just say that this one has the same kind of eye gouging, limb lopping, gut munching, face peeling violence that would have made this an instant video nasty target if it were released in the period it’s succeeding so well at copying. Not to mention, there’s even the ‘person bends down to reveal to the audience that someone else is standing behind them’ shot which was popular for a time in films such as Argento’s Tenebrae (reviewed here) and De Palma’s Raising Cain. There are even a couple of scenes, one right at the start and one in the middle, where Lisa’s eye make up makes her look a little like Jessica Harper in Suspiria (reviewed here).

Another thing is the score by Oran Loyfer, which sounds very much like something Goblin or Bruno Nicolai or Keith Emerson or even Libra would have provided, by the time it gets to the end of the picture. It totally goes there and even features a cheesy song with lyrics pertaining to the story for the end credits. End credits which, I should add, contain a long thanks section near the finish which includes Lamberto Bava and Alan Jones among the people listed.  

So yeah, that’s me done on The Well. If this somehow gets a Blu Ray release at some point I will definitely be snapping this one up… it’s the kind of thing you might want to watch on a double bill with something like The Church, I reckon and, as I said, fans of those kinds of movies would do well to acquaint themselves with this one, for sure. All it needed was a bit of nudity and it would have been absolutely pitch perfect but, what we do get (apart from a terrible twist about the owner of the pub across from the castle, which was telegraphed pretty much from the start of the movie when you meet him) is pretty close. I loved this one.

Black Sabbath aka I Tre Volti Della Paura

A Wurdulak
In Your Ear

Black Sabbath
aka I Tre Volti Della Paura
Italy 1963
Directed by Mario Bava  
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B
From the Macabre Visions -
The Films Of Mario Bava Blu Ray box

Warning: Various spoilers in this review.

Black Sabbath, or I Tre Volti Della Paura to give its original title, is Mario Bava’s 7th film where he’s actually credited as director (although followers of his work will know he helped out on a lot more uncredited directing jobs throughout his career). It’s the third film presented in Arrows ‘blink and you missed it’ Macabre Visions - The Films Of Mario Bava Blu Ray boxed edition and it’s a film which has been released in two, very different versions over the years. The I Tre Volti Della Paura version in Italy which, for the record, is the version I watched for this review and the Black Sabbath US version, retitled to cash in on Bava’s success with Black Sunday (reviewed here). Both versions are included in the Arrow disc, with an additionally interesting, half hour long visual essay of side by side comparisons on some of the many differences between the two versions.

The film is one of those portmanteau horror movies which became so popular in the 1960s and early 1970s especially. The Italian version is bookended with two scenes where Boris Karloff, who is also in one of the three segments, talks to the audience. The opening on the Italian one has him standing on some other-worldly precipice with a blue background until, by the end, his features in close up are purely lit in red against the blue, making for a very vibrant, trademark use of colour by Bava. The US edition merely has a floating head close up of Karloff and is far less interesting visually. The bookend scene, where Karloff is still dressed as the character from his segment and riding a horse, is a wonderful piece where the artifice of the production is deliberately shown... the camera pulling out to show the half horse mechanism Karloff is riding with the background going by and men holding branches running around the camera for the foreground scenery. This was completely excised from the US version.

So we have three stories... The Telephone, The Wurdulak and A Drop Of Water. At least that’s the order of them in the Italian version... in the US print they kind of shuffled them around.

The Telephone is set in the apartment of a woman, Rosy, played by Michèle Mercier, who is told she will die that night. It’s strongly intimated to her that it’s er ex-lover Frank, who has escaped from jail and coming to kill her for revenge. However, half way through, when she calls on her ex-girlfriend Mary (played by Lidia Alfonsi) for help, it’s revealed that it’s really her former lesbian lover who has been making the calls to try and get back with her. And then, since the former boyfriend escape was also true, it turns out... Frank arrives and kills Mary before being stabbed to death by Rosy.

The Wurdulack features Mark Damon as a young count who falls in with a family worried by a vampire creature called a Wurdulak. Karloff went to hunt down and kill the one who was terrorising the local area but, in the process, became one himself and, as the segment progresses and Damon falls in love with a character played by the truly beautiful Susy Andersen, the whole family are eventually turned into the creatures. It’s actually not the twist ending I was expecting but it works well enough.

The third segment, A Drop Of Water, is my favourite of the three and, after a trained nurse is called to a home to dress the body of an old woman who has died while holding a seance, she steals her ring. The eerie sounds in her apartment such as the drop of water and the sound of a fly which was on the cadaver's ring finger follow the nurse home and she is slowly terrorised by these various sounds before the corpse shows up and the nurse ends up strangling herself due to its supernatural dominance over her.

The film is, of course, jam packed with various Bava signatures such as use of various shapes and details in the foreground of the camera, used to split different sections of the shots. There’s also that propensity to shoot from a bit above the characters or, often, from just below their eye line.

And then there’s his use of colour lighting, of course. Almost the whole of The Telephone takes place in Rosy’s flat and it’s all filtered through a pale lilac lighting scheme. It’s interesting that, for the most part, Bava’s colour use is still big washes of specific hues but, in these three segments they’re mostly much more subdued than in many of the movies he’s known for. The Wurdulak goes from the blues of night to kind of subdued pinks of a family home and A Drop Of Water uses pale blues and reds with the odd bit of orange. Everything is a bit less overt but no less ‘Bavaesque’ but it’s interesting to note that, on the US version the colours were still further muted, perhaps because they just weren’t used to seeing colour manipulated as strongly and expressively as when the great Mario Bava brought them out to play.

All in all, Black Sabbath is a pretty fun watch and it’s nice seeing the consummate acting of Boris Karloff in the middle segment. The visual essay about the differences in the US version, with different sound mixes, alternate footage in some sequences and some unsubtle musical stingers on Les Baxter’s strident musical score on the US version (it’s a more appropriate score by Roberto Nicolosi on the Italian version, I think) is an eye opener. Especially when the one giallo segment, The Telephone, has been completely changed on the US version. The implication that Rosy and Mary were once lovers is completely obliterated. As is the plot about Frank escaping from prison. In the US version, he’s dead and it’s actually Frank’s ghost who is coming for Rosy... from mystery giallo to supernatural horror with just a few ommissions and inserts. So, yeah, I still don’t trust the US versions of other countries’ movies, for sure. So, if you’re going to watch this movie, my best advice would be to make sure whatever version you own has the original Italian print on it. It’s worth the trade off against Karloff’s own voice being dubbed over in Italian because it’s a much stronger film in its original incarnation. Definitely one to have a look at if you are in the mood for something spooky and colourful, for sure.

Nightmare City

Halt! Hugo’s There!

Nightmare City (aka Incubo Sulla Città Contaminata)
Italy/Mexico/Spain 1980
Directed by Umberto Lenzi 
Arrow Films All Region Blu Ray/DVD dual release

I’ve been wanting to see Nightmare City for a year or so, since catching up to Stelvio Cipriani’s score on a CD reissue put out by Digitmovies. It’s technically a zombie movie and therefore, I would argue, does indeed belong in the horror category of movie, although I’m sure many people would mistake it for a gory thriller. This is understandable, since the plotline does deal with supercharged, atomic infected humans who have all gone loopy and start killing everyone in various ways... but I’d have to argue the case that the film’s reputation as being a movie in the zombie genre is pretty spot on since, after seeing the zombies riddles with bullets and otherwise killed, they are technically reanimating from the dead to carry on their addiction to blood-letting. This brings a supernatural element into the film which elevates it, depending on your point of view as to which direction the movement goes, and places it firmly into the realm of the horror movie.

This one has a very simple story, for what it is, but the main start off point of a plane full of passengers landing at an airport without permission and, when the doors are opened at the request of the police, delivering a huge outpouring of crazy, zombie people who attack an entire city, was an interesting enough premise to make sure I sought this one out. That being said, I’d caught wind of this Arrow restoration being underway a couple of years back, so I waited until this was released a month or so ago before I made my purchasing decision. In the wild world of film, especially with genre horror and its unwanted attraction from the scissor crazy hands of the censors, the modern film buyer has to be careful and do the research.

The film mainly follows the plight of a TV reporter called Dean, played by Hugo Stiglitz (fans of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds might recognise an homage to this actor in one of the character names of that movie), who witnesses and manages to escape the slaughter at the airport. When he returns to the TV station and finds himself silenced by the military, he then sees the studio who are putting on a live 'contemporary dance show', which obviously involves lots of women in tight fitting leotards, similarly pulled apart by the zombies. He escapes and tries to find his wife Anna, played by Laura Trotter, who is a nurse working at the local hospital... the most obvious place for the contaminated zombies to strike next, as they are rushed in as victims before becoming rampant antagonists themselves. Dean and Anna again manage to escape and they travel about trying to avoid zombies while we cut between them and a couple of equally “are my lovers and relations safe” subplots involving a couple of the military personnel, as we watch the government and the army being thwarted at every turn by the creatures.

Now the zombies in this are, it has to be said, quite intelligent although, it should also be pointed out, they seem to have no consistency in their attitudes or actions when it comes to their murderous attacks. They are quite intelligent and are good at cutting phone wires and disabling electrical power to buildings and areas with a quite deliberate snip of their varied cutting implements... but they seem to approach their killing of innocent victims in a manner which can either be simply ripping them apart and drinking their blood or, with more sophisticated methods like machine gunning them down or slitting their throats, for example. Which doesn’t give them a lot of credibility, especially when some of them stop to aggressively disrobe the female victims before “goring them up good” as you might expect from both a movie which was one of those listed in the notorious Video Nasties scare of the 1980s and, well... an Italian movie of that period where female nudity was pretty much an essential ingredient in films intended for an adult audience. And when I say adult, as is always the case with these brutal but enjoyable romps, I use the term strictly in terms of age restrictions rather than to unwittingly accredit these films with a level of moral responsibility or maturity.

That being said, there is usually an interesting element of hidden sophistication in some of the most excessive exploitation films and it would be hypocritical of me to say I didn’t enjoy these kinds of affairs. However, I much prefer the movies which have a measure of visual elegance about them and, while fan favourite director Umberto Lenzi does have an eye for putting together a fast paced, understandable movie, this one left me a little cold in terms of creative cinematography it has to be said. Although this one does try to rise above the simple nature of the format by bringing up the zombie threat in conversation as the fulfilling of the blight of human nature at some point... it’s mostly paying lip service and is very brief on this point.

As usual though, there are some nice moments in here which are worth watching, including a scene which made me smile when the zombies crash through some doors into an operating theatre and the chief surgeon responds by elegantly throwing his scalpel across the room and into one of the zombies. I don’t know why but the timing on this moment just made me chuckle midst all the crazy carnage. Another scene with an unmanned lawnmower moving across the grass, however, just demonstrates the stupidity of one of the central protagonists and it almost seems like an ironic form of justice in terms of the value of characters like this in the film when they come to a bitter end.

There’s also a strange moment where the realm of the non-diegetic soundtrack of Cipriani’s excellent score... well apart from those horrible 1980s source music sections... blends with the action on the film in a way that it almost imposes on the action. By this I refer to a scene where Dean and Anna suddenly turn, presumably as we discover, to the sound of a group of zombie footsteps. However, when Hugo Stiglitz expression changes, the sound of the footsteps isn’t audible yet on the foley, but Cipriani’s slow and ambient baseline has just kicked in, like it does in a lot of sequences to conjure up the atmosphere of a zombie attack. The result being that, at this moment, it looks like Dean is getting his cue from the score as opposed to anything visible or audible on the screen... kind of a bizarre juxtaposition, I thought.

Now, this really isn’t, as far as I’m concerned, a genre classic like George A. Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead or Lucio Fulci’s Zombi (aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie Flesh Eaters - reviewed here) but I am glad to have seen it because I love the premise and, although the film is pretty repetitive and not in any way scary, as a lot of zombie pictures are, I never really got bored with it and am happy to have this one on the shelf. Arrow have done as bang up a job as they can on the restoration which, in this case, has given them a few problems. They have put two different source print transfers on the discs and you can choose which option you would rather watch and, if you’re into the reasons why this is so, then you can watch one of the many extras, Nightmare City And The Limits Of Restoration, to find out just what the issues are. I found this pretty interesting and informative which, frankly, is the sign of both a good package and, in this case, a conscientious production team on this particular incarnation of the home video version.

The ending section of this film has come in for a lot of criticism over the years and, unfortunately, I was already primed for it because it’s famously not what people wanted from it. Indeed, it is a terrible cliche of an ending and, alas, I can’t really tell you the last intertitle which comes up on the film before the credits run without giving you a huge spoiler... but I have to say that I didn’t mind this ending too much myself. That being said, though, if I wasn’t already prepared for it I’m sure I would have let out a huge moan and had a bit of a rant about it. I can see why the ending has the reputation it has and.... well... I think it’s possib;y deserved. All in all, though, Nightmare City, while not exactly a classic in my book, is the kind of enjoyable rubbish it’s easy to pass a bit of the afternoon with. Being as it’s completely unscary, it would certainly fall into my personal “comfort horror” category and I’m sure fans of the genre in this period will be well up for it. Not the best I’ve seen but certainly not the worst and if you’re into this kind of stuff, the new Arrow version is an essential purchase. Give it a go sometime if late 1970s to mid 1980s zombie movies are your thing.