Halloween Picks 2009 - Demons (1985)

Well, it's that time of the year again. The temperature drops, the leaves fall and you start feeling an uncontrollable urge to watch horror movies. Yes, Halloween steadily approaches, and, seeing as last year my Halloween Picks section was somewhat successful, I decided I'd do it again this year. Except I'll just make one recommendation per post - time is a precious thing, and this days I haven't had a lot of it free to spend blogging. So let's dive right in into the first recommendation, which is...

Dèmoni (in english, Demons) Lamberto Bava's 1985 classic.
The story is quite simple: a group of people go to the cinema to see a movie about a group of young adults that find a tomb and, with it, a prophecy to the end of the world. The catch is that what is happening on screen, soon starts happening in real life, and these people find themselves trapped in the theater, with more and more of them turning into revolting, violent demons (one bite, one scratch was enough to turn anyone into a demon).

Simple enough, and maybe that's why it works. We never get an explanation as to why these people turned into demons in the first place, what's behind the strange mask in the lobby or how exactly they got trapped in the theater in a matter of minutes - but none of that matters. The action on screen is so unrelenting that all this never crosses your mind. It's just craziness on top on more craziness. This is a splatterfest in the best sense of the word, the gore level is crazy: it's a rollercoaster of mutilations and gross-out moments, with pus and blood flying everywhere on screen. This movie preceded some of my favorite humorous gorefests, like Evil Dead 2 and Braindead, and it's easy to see that those movies drew some kind of inspiration from Demons.
The characters are an interesting blend of people: we get the somewhat likeable main characters (the two girls, Cheryl and Kathy, and the two boys they meet at the cinema) , and in addition to them we get such colorful characters as a bickering couple, a blind man and his cheating, shameless wife, and, my favorite, a pimp that I swear is straight out of a grindhouse movie. His acting and his lines were always delivered in such an over the top way that he was incredibly funny and I found myself rooting for him to stick around for longer.

The plot is, of course, sort of ridiculous, but the movie is so repulsive, hilarious and exciting that it doesn't really matter. It's rare this days to see a horror movie so incredibly fun an entertaining (Drag me to Hell is the most recent example that comes to mind, despite it being fairly tame when compared to Demons), so this is a welcomed trip back to the non-sensical hilarity of the 80s.
If you like gore and 80s style horror - look no further. I guarantee Demons will be right up your alley. It gets 4 out of 5 Demons from me.