It was an interesting experience watching Lucio Fulci's "Demonia," and that really has nothing but a toddler's nose hair to do with the actual movie itself, because saying that this film is at all interesting would be like me dropping my jaw in shock at the sight of a papercut onscreen. The movie is a lingering and subdued piece of tedium. The only reason this film appears to have been made is to string together some random scenes of minor gore and slap the Lucio Fulci director's tag on there in order to bring in the film's audience. This is not Fulci at his finest, nor at his most creative. The plots in Fulci's work were never their best qualities, but they always worked 100% for the kind of movies they were and what they wanted to accomplish. I never gave a damn, because the energy was there and the style was present more than anything else. In the best of Fulci's body of work, his grace and complete respect for film made them the cult classics that they are today. This film has neither the plot nor the style. It doesn't even look like a Lucio Fulci movie. Watching this film is like watching a quickie weekend project from the sometimes hit and sometime miss Joe D'Amato, and not the Godfather of Gore.
But the reason that I say this film is interesting, is because this was the first time I ever thought of Fulci not as a god of stylized scares and grotesque images, but as a mortal human being who can make some mistakes on screen. You have to take into consideration that it has been years and years since I have seen this film. If I remember correctly, I was still in school. This was around my first introduction to the works of Lucio Fulci, and when you're incredibly young like I was, and you see something so cool and so brutal and beautiful like "The Beyond" or "The New York Ripper," you do not immediately just stop right there. You keep watching and watching all of the director's filmography that you can get your hands on. That's where "Demonia" came in. It was the first Fulci movie that I did not like. Of course, now I live in a mindframe that is not surprised when a title in anyone's resume turns up trash. Everybody is human. So naturally, I've since seen "Sweet House of Horrors," "Manhattan Baby," and "Aenigma." I only saw "Demonia" once, and that was when I purchased it at a cheap price from a local retail store. While sorting out some of my DVD's the other day, I noticed that my copy of "Demonia" appears to have gone missing. Maybe I loaned it to someone and never got it back, but you know what. I really don't care. I would rather worry about what happened to my copy of "Bee Girls" as opposed to the fate of "Demonia."
Maybe it could be that I'm just not a fan of the nunsploitation genre, which is most certainly what this movie falls under. I've seen a couple here and there that I have thoroughly enjoyed like "Flavia The Heretic," and if "The Devils" counts then by all means add that to the list. But for every one of those films you have something like "The Other Hell" that bores you with its religious conspiracy dogma until actually showing what you paid to see, and even then you feel like you've been duped. With "Demonia" I was duped in all the areas of thrills and style. I don't know exactly what Fulci thought of his other films, but looking at "Demonia," one gets the sense that he doesn't really like this film all that much. This looks like something he was talked into doing, or maybe just picked up the pieces when another director left. I don't know if that's true, and the latter part of it I doubt, but it has the feel of movies that actually are along those lines.
Honestly, how do you mess up an exploitation movie that has an opening scene that shows nuns being strung up on a cross and crucified in Sicily during the 15th century? Not that I'm condoning any of that, of course. That's all quite terrible, but you can't have nunsploitation without the 'ploitation. Are these nuns evil or were they wrongfully executed for a crime they did not commit? Those questions lead us into the modern day scene of the film, where a college professor is leading his students on an archaeological dig within the same area that those 15th Century murders took place in. And whenever young pretty students go wandering around sites where people were sadistically murdered, bad stuff goes down. If it were anyone else, that would be one thing, but these spirits have waited 4 long centuries for some young college student meat.
Of course, in films like these, for all the college students that wind up dead, you've got the one who actually does know what is going on. Leave that to the blonde haired Liza, which by the way was also the first name of Katherine MacColl in "The Beyond." The good luck of the Liza name did not pass on to this film. Anyway, even though Liza was almost negative 500 when the nun murders took place, she constantly has visions of that very event, causing her to investigate, even though many others insist that she just leave it alone. I'm surprised they cared that much.
As the film goes on, basically what we're given is a narcoleptic slasher film. The mystery begins to unfold to where the nuns are actually part of a murderous cult, and the spirit of the mother superior begins to haunt not only Liza, but the rest of the people in the nearby village. That may be a surprise to them, but it's not to us, especially when the box cover contains an evil nun staring at us with cold dead eyes. People then try to get as close to the mystery as Liza does, but whenever someone figures something out, they wind up dead. I guess this is the pelican brief of satanic nun ghost cults.
If the movie's got anything going for it, it's a couple of sheer laughs that come at moments when we are supposed to be shocked. Two drunks are wandering throughout the village at night, stumbling over their own feet, and probably lost without even realizing it. In what seems like it should belong in a far out slapsticky raunch flick, one of the drunks falls through a hole in the floor and conveniently lands on a bunch of spikes. The other drunk naturally follows him. I'm surprised the Wilhelm Scream wasn't used. At another point, a man is running through the woods, and then we cut to some other action, but when we cut back to the man, his legs are strung up to two trees without absolutely any explanation as to how this happened. The trees then fall apart in opposite directions, causing the man to be completely and graphically pulled in half. Maybe if I hadn't seen this done much better and more logical in "Cut and Run" I would have gasped and not smirked.
I've gotten over the fact that this is a tragically disappointing film, but what has got to me the most over the years is that I completely regret that this is the first DVD that I ever got from Shriek Show. I went back and read my original review for this film, which I wrote directly after I first saw it, and I was hard on Shriek Show. Very very hard on Shriek Show. The picture quality of the DVD was terrible, incredibly pixelated and murky, and the extras mainly consisted of "jump to a death" options. Since then Shriek Show, and Media Blasters in general, has become a company that I have the upmost respect for, and I rank them right up there with Anchor Bay, Blue Underground, and Synapse (companies that I obsessively check their library each month). Shriek Show has a wide range of some titles that I consider to be masterpieces, and other titles that I consider to be, well, "Demonia." They know what they're doing, and they know who their fans are and what they want to see. "Demonia" may be a lousy film, but they knew that I would buy it, so they put it out there. But don't settle for "Demonia" when you can get "Four of the Apocalypse," "Zombi 2," or "The New Gladiators," which by the way have been graciously put out by Media Blasters.
One of Lucio Fulci's THE BEYOND last films DEMONIA stars Brett Halsey and Meg Register as a pair of archaeologists whose expedition into the Valley of...More at Family Video
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