Last month I missed out on doing any posts about Italian genre cinema, but October gives us the perfect time to catch up. And unholy monsters from hell gives us a perfectly seasonal adversaries to base a blog post on. In the late 80's, demons started to get the spotlight zombies used to have with a couple of fresh-faced directors.
Demons (Démoni, 1985)
Director: Lamberto Bava
The son of Mario Bava, Lamberto, started out as a assistant director in his father's films, but got to start his own directing career from the late 1970's onward. In the early 80's he was a ward of Dario Argento, who produced and co-wrote this 4th-wall-breaking movie to him. The artist also known as John Old Jr. considers this to be his best movie and probably is not wrong there.
Shot in Berlin, a group of different people have won a ticket to a film premiere in a brand new movie theatre. The showing is to be a horror movie that has effects never before seen on the big screen. The event soon turns to a nightmare as it turns out the group is trapped inside the theatre and blood-hungry demons start slaughtering them one by one.
The film can't be said to be entirely serious. It has a sense of irony of having one of the cinema-goers be a blind man. Also the main theme from the soundtrack is probably the craziest composition Goblin's Claudio Simonetti ever did. But the film has a good eye for set pieces, a decent budget that paid for a lot of really expensive effects and a willingness to forget about certain details, such as the plot, in order to get going. The younger Bava never could quite match his old man's style, but still he was gifted as a creator of suspense and putting unique visions on screen. Not to mention gore, that comes bountifully. It was not actually a preference of Bava himself, so I expect Argento had his fingers in the game.
If there's a downside to this coked-up fever dream it's that Demons basically work too much like zombies, in that they can turn people into one of their own kind. That's why the apocalyptic ending seems way too familiar from plenty of zombie movies, Italian or otherwise, that show the disease spread to the entire world. But that was the 1980's when people had a common fear of an illness bringing about the end of the world.
★★★★
Demons 2 (Dèmoni 2... l'incubo ritorna, 1986)
Dir. Lamberto Bava
Like the Die Hard films, it seemed the Demons movies also were going to be set on bigger and bigger settings. This one sees an entire high-rise become a battlefield when Demons attack! This time they won't step out of the movie screen, but come from your TV sets standing in the most sacred places of your own homes.
The film has a new set of stock characters with their flimsy character arcs, or just colorful deaths. It feels the script is even more haphazard than the first one as a lot of set-up is just forgotten along the way. It's not bad, but it all just feels so uninspired. Almost all good ideas of the movie were already done in the first one.
There's still some points of interest in this. Fans of architecture in Italian films may get a kick on how the film moves between different apartments. It's critiques of modern living and entertainment are also somewhat similar to the mayhem seen in Gremlins 2 four years later, but it doesn't really go far enough into these to reach the same dizzying heights.
★★
The Church (La chiesa, 1989)
Dir. Michele Soavi
The Church is interesting in just how Catholic it is. Past bloodletting done in the name of the Church comes to haunt modern librarians and priests trying to work in a building built on the blood of innocents. In Italy in particular, it seems a lot of the most bitter agnostic attacks against the power of religion came from horror movies, which is probably why they were seen so subversive back in the day.
Soavi digs a hole for himself by having a too good, brutal and savage prologue set in the Crusades. The opening scene reads like something out of the catalogue of Paul Verhoeven, another critic of the violence done by institutions. But after the opening, the film lulls in athmosphere a bit too long. The Church itself with its dark corridors and ominous statues is a very nice environment, but after enough camera drives and crash zooms where scarcely nothing happens makes the audience groan for the movie to roll along. At this point Soavi wasn't that skillful in building up tensions, part of the reason being that his characters are always so paper-thin as to be boring to follow.
The film's music is an odd cocktail of Goblin, Keith Emerson and some Philip Glass compositions that seem to be taken straight out of Koyaanisqatsi. It's a good measuring stick on how Soavi has problems establishing a clear thoroughline for the film. Visually, though, it's very striking with magnificent effects work by Sergio Stivaletti. The gore and creature scenes in particular are nasty and memorable, so the film has plenty to offer for fans of Soavi's style, even if the film as a whole somewhat creaks at the seams.
★★★
Cemetary Man (DellaMorte DellAmore, 1994)
Dir. Michele Soavi
Since we are covering double D's, I have to throw in also Soavi's probably most popular and unique movie. Loosely based on the fumetti comic Dylan Dog, Dellamorte Dellamore is a kind of unique little gem in the horror comedy genre, a sort of match between the general skewed worldview and sense of humor of Danger: Diabolik and the hysterical antics of Evil Dead 2.
Rupert Everett plays a lonely but cynical cemetary groundskeeper Francesco Dellamorte who has a surprising amount tof work on his hands. The cemetary turns the dead back to life after three days so he has to make sure the zombies stay underground. But the lovelorn young man can't help to fall for either widows or corpses of young women, which is harder to combine with his line of work.
The film has a autumny visuals where it's all shades of brown and grey, down to earth, which contrasts nicely the cartoony aspects of the story and performances on screen. The film has a episodic nature, where it does resemble the comic books it is adapting. Likewise in the amount of sex and violence on screen, although to contemporaries like Braindead, the film seems downright tame.
Not only about the duality of love and death, the film also depicts the longing to escape a small town and its repetitive cycles. Dellamorte goes through the same loops every night, but refuses to learn or to move on. His mute partner Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro) fares better, and genuinely falls in love, albeit to a severed head. The movie, as outrageous a premise as it has and dry humor, is actually in favor of enjoying life and seeing as much of it as one can.
★★★★
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