(Review) "Demons 2": 20th Anniversary Screening

Lamberto Bava's lively 1985 breakthrough shocker Demons remains a fan favorite and probably the defining work of his uneven but efficient filmography. After an eerie setup in which various Berlin transit riders accept an invitation to the Metropol theatre from a strange figure in a metal mask, the film stumbles into a series of poorly-dubbed, 80s-metal-scored gore set pieces, but climaxing in a thrilling, apocalyptic ending that makes its soft second act worth plodding through. If you believe Roger Corman’s credo that if the first and the third acts are solid, then “what you do in the middle doesn’t matter”, then by generous accounts Demons is a success.

Demons 2, produced less than a year later, offers a near-identical concept, except here, the transmission device is a television signal and the location a high-rise apartment building. It more than satisfies Joe Bob Briggs’ patented rule that a sequel should be the exact same movie all over again, and should appeal to afficionados of The Twonky and Jerry Manders' "Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television".

In the first Demons' film with the film (keeping up?) the titular nogoodnicks entered our world—and human bodies—via the sharp prongs of a cursed mask that was unearthed in Nostradamus' tomb. In Demons 2, the fwtf features another group of clueless teens who have entered a quarantined disaster area where presumably the invasion was contained and eradicated. They happen upon a demon’s ashen remains where blood from one of their wounds triggers its resurrection. The creature then comes towards the screen, and out of it, entering its first victim’s body.

Several parallel plots—such as they are—collide throughout the ten floors of the apartment building “The Tower”: in one suite, there’s a birthday party in full swing for Sally (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni) and her senior classmates, who, without the distractions of the Internet, iPods, and Second Life, must entertain themselves by robot-dancing to some 80s alternative hits on the boom box while swilling down booze in paper cups, careful not to spill any on their feathered ‘dos and shoulder pads.

Sally’s a shrill one, and while her dialogue from screenwriters Bava, Dario Argento, Franco Ferrinni, and Dardano Sachetti is less than Hughesian (“My hair stinks! This dress stinks. This whole thing is disgusting! These sleeves on this go back and forth--what am I gonna do?”), the actress has an endearing presence reminiscent of her American teen scream queen counterpart of the time, Jill Schoelen. As the first to be possessed, Sally quickly mutates into a fanged, milky-eyed harpy who spreads the demon virus throughout the complex ala Cronenberg’s Shivers/Frissons/They Came From Within.

In neighbouring apartments, bookish George (David Edwin Knight) is concerned for the safety of his expectant wife Hannah (Nancy Brilli), a family with two young children (one of them a prepubescent Asia Argento) try to escape, a latch-key kid and his dog become possessed, and some truly dedicated fitness addicts, who under the tutelage of a returning Bobby Rhodes (who memorably played a pimp in the first Demons) enact a Howard Hawksian standoff in the underground parking garage.

First beastie to exit through Sally’s cathode ray tube makes for an impressive effect (more or less replicated in Ringu), albeit once based heavily on Rick Baker’s pioneering work on Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which was likely an unacknowledged influence here.

Lots of gloppy monsters follow, more akin to zombies really, all pustules and razor teeth and bloodshot orbs, anticipating “the infected” of the later biohazard-themed 28 Days Later than anything genuinely supernatural (there’s no internal story logic to these nasties, where they come from, what they want, what they do--other than to cause a lot of icky havoc—is left for the theatre of the mind…). Serious horror buffs will strain to find a metaphor in the television angle—perhaps Bava aspires to cheekily paraphrase McLuhan in that here, the medium is the massacre? (a reach, I admit...).

The momentum is dulled, somewhat, by the third-act emergence of a gawd-awful rubber puppet--of the John Carl Beuchler variety ala Ghoulies and laughably unconvincing even by 80s standards (and we all bought into “Yoda”, ET, and the Gelflings, didn’t we?).

Those of us of a certain age (read: those of us who first consumed Douglas Coupland and tingled: "that's me!") will enjoy the soundtrack: alt-rock staples The Smiths, The Cult, The Dead Can Dance, Art Of Noise, Gene Loves Jezebel, Peter Murphy underscore the KY jelly and karo syrup free-for-all that occupies much of what passes for plot in Act Two. It all oozes and splats to the requisite “the end?” coda that, to no one’s surprise, segued to a Demons 3 and a Demons 4.

Following the screening, presented by Rue Morgue Magazine and London, Ontario’s Vagrancy Films, the jazzed audience was treated to a Q&A with “Sally” herself, actress Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni, who currently resides in New York (her home town, actually), and was in the GTA for Rue Morgue magazine's annual Festival Of Fear blow-out at the FanExpo convention.

The 36-year old actress, not looking a day older than she appears in the film, was clearly moved by the enthusiastic reception, and admitted she still feels a kinship with her character, who she says “makes her sad”.

Demons 2, like its preceding chapter, was shot in Munich. She recalled that the makeup took hours to apply, and that her contact lenses were quite painful—obviously, FX technology has come a long way. Bava, who cameos in the film as her father, didn’t give her a lot of direction, and hired her without an audition, based upon her other film work.

Cataldi-Tassoni went on to become something of a Italian scream queen, appearing in Dario Argento’s Opera, Phantom Of The Opera remake (as a child, she grew up in the opera scene, performing in “La Boheme” at the age of three!), as well as Andreas Marfori’s “Il Bosco/Horror Clutch, and Bava’s recent Ghost Son. When asked to compare the directing styles of Bava and Argento, she demurred “quantum physics…completely different universes…” and left it at that.

Extending warm regards from Lamberto Bava and FX supervisor Sergio Stivaletti, Cataldi-Tassondi was off to the Gladstone Hotel to perform numbers from her debut music CD “Limbo Balloon” accompanied by Maurizio Guarini of the prog-rock band (and frequent Argento collaborators) Goblin.

Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni will next be seen in Dario Argento’s Mother Of Tears, the long-awaited sequel to Suspiria and Inferno, debuting in just a little more than a week at The 32nd Annual Toronto International Film Festival.

© Robert J. Lewis 2007

Dario Argento Returns For "Midnight Madness"

Great news today for fans of one of the horror genre's true visionaries: Dario Argento, the Italian master of trippy, gore-soaked fantasias, will premiere his long-awaited"Mother Of Tears" (La Terza Madre) as part of the Midnight Madness program at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival.

This is the conclusion of his "Three Mothers" trilogy that began in 1977 with "Suspiria" and was left hanging after the botched release of 1980's thematic followup "Inferno". In "Mother", archaeology student Sarah (portrayed by Asia Argento--yes, his daughter) releases the demonic forces of a powerful witch which erupt into a wave of suicide and crime in advance of her resurrection.

The film also stars European genre vet Udo Kier (Andy Warhol's "Frankenstein", and recently, in Rob Zombie's faux "Grindhouse" trailer "Werewolf Women Of The S.S.") and Daria Nicolodi, Dario's ex-wife (and Asia's mother), who appeared in his earlier films and in Asia's directorial debut "Scarlett Diva".

In the early years of the Midnight Madness program Argento was a staple: his "Opera", "Trauma", and "The Stendhal Syndrome" screened at the original Bloor Cinema venue, and the thrillers he produced for Michel Soavi ("The Church", "The Sect") debuted there, too. For years, Argento's films were butchered by American distributors and spottily released under crappy titles and lousy ad campaigns.

In recent years, Argento has kept a low profile, but has worked steadily--last year's TV movie "Do You Like Hitchcock?" was a return to his giallo roots, as was the Michael Mann-esque police procedural "The Card Player". He also found time to venture to Canadian shores to shoot two episodes in Vancouver for Mick Garris' "Masters Of Horror" series: "Jenifer" and "Pelts".

Argento will also be a guest at Rue Morgue's "Festival Of Fear" this coming August.

It'll mark a reunion between Argento and fellow guest George A. Romero, who together produced the original "Dawn Of The Dead" and co-directed the underrated Edgar Allan Poe tribute "Two Evil Eyes". Romero has a film in the Midnight Madness program this year, too: "Diary Of The Dead", the official fourth installment in his zombie saga that began with 1968's "Night Of The Living Dead".

Argento's films aren't always perfect--narrative "logic" isn't a concern and he seems to delight in deliberately polarizing and frustrating the audience--but each is always gorgeously designed and a feast for the senses, and ala works of Hitchcock or DePalma, manage to feature at least one extended set piece that's a marvel of timing and intensity.

Here's a list of the entire "Midnight Madness" lineup. Argento, plus Romero, plus Stuart Gordon, plus Takashi Miike? September can't come quick enough...

My Top DVDs Of 2006: New Release Pt. 1

Masters Of Horror (various volumes)

(2006) (Anchor Bay Home Entertainment, 1 disc)

As Masters Of Horror plummets deeper into mediocrity with each new installment (can Garris or someone please please please declare a moratorium on plots concerning unbalanced white males obsessed with lost-and-or-dead-or-dying loves?), a handful of feature-packed Anchor Bay releases featuring some of the stronger segments from the inaugural season remind us of why many of us horror fans got excited over this project in the first place (but alas, not why some like myself continue to tune in each weekend…).

Reactions from the fan base were predictably "mixed" (of the "my Master Of Horror" is better than "your Master Of Horror" vein), but almost everyone is in agreement that MOH 1.0’s bonafide masterwork was Joe Dante’s "Homecoming", the veteran fantasist’s most brazenly political work and a rare North American-produced drama/none Michael Moore production that dared to take on the Bush Administration’s “War On Terror” catastrophe head-on. Not that the episode is just a sixty-minute liberal polemic—it’s a deliriously funny, angry, and, yes, blood-splattered zombie parable in which the bodies of the Iraq war-dead rise to (literally) cast their vote to end the madness and bring the boys back home, much to the chagrin of the powers-that-be, embodied in the form of a loudmouthed, gun-toting, Washington skank whom the producers assure us isn’t meant to be Ann Coulter (remember, Gremlins 2’s “Daniel Clamp” wasn’t based on Donald Trump, either)..

John Carpenter has long been one of my all-time favorite directors, and while I’m myopic enough in my devotion to have leapt to the defense of Ghosts Of Mars and Village Of The Damned (look, I just like the way the guy makes movies, so sue me…), I’ve long harbored the fear that the chance of us getting another Halloween or The Thing from his camp was about as likely as a Criterion edition of Day The Clown Cried. But his installment, “Cigarette Burns”, proved to be very good stuff indeed, falling just short of “return to form”, if only because he didn’t get to shoot it in 2.35:1 Panavision. The tale of a film researcher hired to track down a lost pseudo-snuff feature said to be able to bring about the “absolute end of the world” (“La Fin Absolut Du Mond”) while trying to cope with the death of his girlfriend allowed Carpenter to revisit the Lovecraftian surrealism he first attempted in In The Mouth Of Madness and craft some truly haunting imagery , chief among them an enslaved angel and snippets of the apocalyptic film itself, with some perfectly envisioned odes to Jodorowsky and Bunuel. It was fueled by an impressive score by Carpenter’s son Cody as well, who obviously spent his childhood hanging out in his dad’s studio with Alan Howarth, listening to old Mike Oldfield LPs.

Season one’s most notorious entry came last, or at least, was supposed to: Takashi Miike’s “Imprint” was refused broadcast by Showtime Networks after it had already been produced, prompting the message boards to fill up with accusations that the whole controversy was staged by Garris and co. (Anchor Bay, in fact, financed the series, and not Showtime) to generate publicity. I doubted that very much, but the more obvious question was: didn’t anyone on staff ever see a typical Miike film and know what they were getting into (it’s like ABC hiring David Lynch to produce the Mulholland Drive pilot and hand it back, dismissing it as “too weird”)? The story of an American journalist who returns to Japan in the 19th century to—yep, track down his lamented, lost love--is harrowing for two reasons: the excruciating, drawn-out torture of the pursued geisha at the hands of her sadistic house Madam, and star Billy Drago’s own kabuki-esque performance, in which he bellows and howls and eyebrow rolls for the folks in the back row, except this ain’t no stage play. Despite that, it bewitches and repels with an atmosphere of dread, nuanced period design, and some truly unsettling imagery even for Miike (along with Fruit Chan’s 3 Extremes and spin-off feature Dumplings made 2006 Asian horror cinema’s “Year Of The Fetus”).

In addition to these essential episodes, I also recommend Don Coscarelli’s “Incident On And Off A Mountain Road”, in which he splendidly adapted Joe R. Lansdale’s twisty short story into a taut, girl-power battle cry (thankfully, the lead character isn’t trying to get over her dead boyfriend…anything but!) that delighted in turning the typical slasher-in-the-woods scenario on its severed ear, and Stuart Gordon’s “Dreams In The Witch-House” which I felt was a pretty successful attempt to transplant H.P. Lovecraft’s abstruse prose and misanthropic internal musings into a coherent spook show, if only it wasn’t hampered by a weak male lead. Dario Argento's "Jenifer" and Larry Cohen's "Pick Me Up" are also worth a look.

Sold individually and in double-packs (the latter option saves a few bucks but the chances of finding a pair-up of two episodes you’d want to own are iffy), the discs might at first seem overpriced at $15-$20 (Canadian) for programs running barely an hour in length, but the supplements are so exceptional--considering the shows are only a few months old there probably wasn’t a lot time to prepare--that fans will find it money well spent. Commentary from the directors and writers can be found on almost all of them (Dante, sadly, does not appear on his entry), as well as the usual behind-the-scenes EPK stuff, closer looks at the makeup and FX, and best of all, career overviews for the superstar directors that are very comprehensive and well-researched.