As much as I consider myself a horror aficionado, Italian horror is a very obvious blemish in my overall viewing experience. I’ve tried to watch Suspiria countless times but never could quite get into it; same with Mario Bava and the film that apparently inspired Friday the 13th and its ilk, A Bay of Blood. There’s something about Italian horror that just never worked for me but I can’t ever seem to figure out why. So, I tried to cast all that aside while I watched Demons for the first time and sadly my strange disinterest in Italian horror remains.
The film starts out strong with a perfect set-up for a b-movie – a group of unsuspecting people are invited to a secret screening at a cinema where they’re shown a schlocky horror film that strangely seems to start coming true! There are some metatextual jokes at low budget horror thrown in with a wink and a nudge (and it’s easy to see the first act of the film being a heavy inspiration for the opening sequence of Scream 2) but the film slowly starts to fall apart as the chaos gets underway.
As exciting as the initial premise is, it’s very clear that ideas ran out quite quickly during production, and so the majority of the film is spent with the main characters staying up on the balcony of the theatre and not much else. The kills look both somehow gross and embarrassingly cheap, the characters bland and uninteresting, and the kind of monsters Demons throws at the audience feels very much like The Evil Dead in a cinema.
Perhaps I did this no favour by watching Popcorn recently, a 90s slasher film that took the premise of a horror movie set in a cinema and provided exactly the kind of tongue-in-cheek loving tone that I kind of expected from Demons but better. It’ll probably be a long time before I check out Demons 2.
Chronicler of the Dark 