Lamberto Bava's "Demons"

Demons (1985)

directed by Lamberto Bava

35mm at Metrograph 3/7/16

Lamberto Bava's Demons (1985) is not relentlessly ridiculous; it relents, for maybe a minute, in the second-to-last scene, before a helicopter comes crashing through the ceiling and after our heroes ride around a movie theater on a motorcycle while slaying the eponymous monsters with a sword. But the other 87 minutes -- replete with chugging power chords and flesh-shredding prosthetics and people so stupid you almost feel bad about how much you don't care about them -- are, to quote Kanye West, fucking ridiculous.

Co-written by spaghetti horror maestro Dario Argento (who directed his last great giallo, Phenomena, that same year), Demons mingles the varicolored, kaleidoscopic hysteria of Argento's better films with the histrionic gore of Fulci's (Zombi 2, The Beyond). The film announces its aesthetic intentions, as if blaring a war horn, in the first moments, as a young woman rides a subway full of '80s subculture caricatures and Goblin keyboardist Claudio Simonetti's manic Italo disco swells, a gloriously gaudy cocktail of Prince, Carpenter's score for Assault on Precinct 13, and "In the Hall of the Mountain King." In case you were worried this might be a serious horror movie, the score sashays your concerns away.

The only time Bava feigns building suspense is in the first scene, when our heroine sees a creepy man whose face is half-adorned with metal, resembling a prototype for a Mortal Kombat character. She runs through a subway station, and of course he catches her. But he's not actually a monster -- he just wants to give her a flier for a movie theater. Gotcha! 

But actually, the movie theater is evil and turns everyone into demons. Gotcha!

Anyway, the rest of the movie is pure slapstick splatter, what Tanner Tafelski called "ballsy maximalist gore." [I can't embed links on my iPad, but here: http://www.bkmag.com/2016/03/02/the-best-old-movies-on-a-big-screen-this-week-nyc-repertory-cinema-picks-march-2-8/8/] The Evil Dead is a restrained arthouse film by comparison. A bunch of people of varying degrees of irritability (a needy blind man, his sexually frustrated niece, some young couples on dates, some prostitutes) end up going to the movie theater, which is showing a horror movie, the kind of blood-saturated, knife-in-hand spaghetti slasher that Argento and Bava pioneered. All the women in the audience hate the movie while the men berate them. I don't know if a movie inhabited exclusively by awful people is itself awful, but there's no one in this entire picture worth liking. Bava establishes wiry personalities for these fleshy husks just so they have silly things to say right before demons tear them to shreds. 

And oh, how wonderful it is when they do get torn to shreds. The first bit of gore, a throbbing pustule popping and leaking Thousand Island Dressing everywhere, is just a tease, and Bava gradually ups the violence -- faces torn off, limbs lopped off, throats shredded like pulled pork, demonic fangs sprouting in excruciating close-up... Eli Roth, hack that he is, couldn't conjure these kinds of ludicrous images if he made a shot-for-shot remake of Demons. 

The gore effects are a special kind of fun, but Demons is Z-grade-Great because the more loquacious moments in between the bouts of carnage are just as uproarious. The acting is b-grade porn calibre, so invariably awful you can't not take the whole thing as anything but a Grand Guignol comedy. It's hard to act this badly; every line of dialogue is delivered wrong, but spectacularly wrong, so precisely wrong that it all has an inexplicably sharp comedic rhythm. People say the obvious stuff they always say in horror movies that qualify as either bad or self-aware or so-bad-they're-good, like, "There has to be an explanation!" shouted with such conviction, you almost think the poor guy believes what he's saying. Or someone saying "I don't want you to see me this way!" to his friends, underselling the fact that he is literally turning into a demon. 

When one sucker says "The mask turns people into Demons!" and someone else asks how he knows that, the guy responds, in the same exact tone, with the same exact tone-deaf cadences, "It says here the mask turns people into Demons!" (I may have that line slightly wrong, but you get the idea.) Demons could be a feature-length version of one of those trailers that accompanied Grindhouse. It's totally possible that Bava et al. thought they were making a genuine scary movie, but every element of this concoction is so specifically bad it all sloshes together into a delicious mess. 

The MVP of the movie is Bobby Rhodes, who plays a tenacious pimp. (He also appears in the sequel as a different character, but really the same character.) When the demons first claw their way through the screen, he immediately ascertains that the movie is evil and possessing people. A common complaint of horror movies is characters often act as though they've never seen a horror movie before; Rhodes' pimp does not have this problem.  

Seconds after organizing the group with a triumphant, "If we stick together, no one will get hurt!" Rhodes, running down a hall, shoves someone aside, yelling, "Get out of my way!" The tonal change between these two lines, yelled within seconds of each other, has to be comedic genius. If he really, truly thought he was delivering these lines seriously, he might be the best bad actor ever.