Black démons

A bad movie almost bad enough to be good, but not quite bad enough to be worth recommending.

Sonia is missing. Her boyfriend Jose thinks that maybe she went to town, but when she doesn't come back, he's pretty sure something bad happened.

But then Jose finds... one of Sonia's shoes! Now he knows something has happened to her.

"Maybe she changed her shoes," suggests Kevin, a cooler head.

They go to her room, and find another pair of her shoes.

"You see!" Jose exclaims. "These are the only other shoes she had! Are you convinced now?"

"Yeah," Kevin says. "She wouldn't have gone to the village barefooted."

These utterly ridiculous, idiotic scenes are meant to be taken seriously. That's the sort of movie you're in for -- accidental comedy. If you can appreciate a film on that level, this is the film for you.

Worse than the dialogue is the pacing. The movie is as slow as the stumbling zombies of the film -- and these zombies have chains around their ankles. Everything is very predictable, and we're left waiting around for the next moment of gore to show up.

The actors are constantly flubbing their lines -- but not in a particularly interesting way. Just stuttering slightly as they deliver ridiculous, stilted dialogue.

For a horror movie, there isn't much blood. Or fear. Or tension. Or horror. Or movie.

Black Demons (1991)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Italian horror flick has a group of people stranded in an old mansion in Brazil when black zombies (not demons) begin to attack them. All of this is brought on because a stupid brother went to witness a voodoo act, which now has the black zombies (not demons) out willing white folks. To say I was disappointed in this film would be a major under statement as I'm usually a fan of Lenzi's films. The Italian horror genre was already dead and buried by the time this film was released and the producer's even released it as Demoni 3 to, I guess, cash in on the two Lamberto Bava films. Those expecting gore are going to be letdown because there's actually not too much of it. We get one good scene where a victim has her eye ripped out and another throat slashing but outside of these scenes the gore is pretty low. This is the type of film we've seen countless times before and I was rather shocked that Lenzi didn't throw anything original into the mix or at least try to make this film fly better. It takes thirty-minutes for the first murder to take place and then we have to wait nearly another thirty-minutes for the next. The film is full of really bad dialogue including one scene where the owner of the mansion finds his maid doing black magic and he punishes her by making her go to her room just like she was a kid! The performances are all rather bland, which is to be expected but the fault of the film's failure has to go back on the director. The film looks very poorly done and there isn't any of the director's typical style.

Here is a movie that could have been a lot more. Released in 1991 under the title Demoni 3 (has nothing to do with the Demons series) and directed by the infamous Umberto Lenzi, the story takes off with a brother and sister and her boyfriend. Her brother becomes possessed by some black magic during a voodoo ritual and later on brings back to life 6 "Black Demons" to kill 6 white people to get revenge for their enslavement when they were alive. This movie moves very slow (as do a lot of Lenzi's films) and is acted quite badly. But then again, the actors didn't have much of a script to go off of. Unlike Lenzi's other classics like Cannibal Ferox or Nightmare City, this movie really doesn't hold your interest at all. With Nightmare City the gore was silly and the acting stupid but it was entertaining because the movie didn't stop, and the same goes for Cannibal Ferox. This movie, on the other hand, had may be 3 decent scenes of gore (most of which had someone getting an eye poked out) and the rest of the film is talking filled with bad background music. The only thing that kept my interest at all was the costuming for the demons/zombies. They looked genuinely kind of creepy. Besides that, the movie is to slow and that is really my main issue. 5\10 stars

This film is supposedly the second sequel to Lamberto Bava's fun eighties trash flick 'Demons', although I'd say it's more like a lacklustre version of Lucio Fulci's zombie masterpiece 'Zombie Flesh-Eaters'. Umberto Lenzi is undoubtedly one of Italy's most diverse and interesting directors, but like many of the best; his career took a downfall towards the end of the eighties, and it's hard to believe that the same man who directed such cult classics as Seven Blood-Stained Orchids and Almost Human also directed this film. The fact that this film is touted to be the third entry in the series started by Lamberto Bava is forgotten about when it comes to the plot, as the film really has nothing to do with the earlier series entries; and this is shown again by the fact that Lambero Bava's own 'The Ogre' is also known as Demons 3! The story here follows three kids who travel to Brazil. One of them is into voodoo, and uses his knowledge of the art to raise a load of dead black slaves. It's not long before the three kids and some other people in the vicinity have a big, flesh eating, problem on their hands!

The problem with this film is that it doesn't have anything in the way of surprises, and while there's some nice gore (including some good gory Fulci style eye gouging), the film is seriously lacking. If you're tuning in for gore only (as you probably should be), you're also likely to be disappointed as the gore isn't relentless, and there are only really a couple of memorable scenes. Bad acting is something you have to expect from a film like this, but with Black Demons; Umberto Lenzi has taken that expectation to a whole new level, with some truly diabolical performances from all concerned. The film starts off slowly, which puts itself on the back foot; as I was already starting to get bored of it before the gore even showed up. One thing that the film does do well, however, is hark back to the classic style of filming. The production values are a little better than Fulci's 1979 classic, but the basics of the film are the same. I can't say many good things about the zombie make-up, and they're nothing like the demons in Lamberto Bava's film. Overall, this movie isn't very good; but it's fairly fun at times, and I preferred it to Demons 2 at least.

The Demons series is a complex one, all entries after the second film having nothing to do with Lamberto Bava's first two movies. The majority of the series consists of unrelated films that have been slapped with a Demons alternative title in certain countries: Michele Soavi's The Church (Demons 3 in Japan), The Sect (Demons 4 in Japan) and Cemetery Man (Demons '95 in Japan), Luigi Cozzi's The Black Cat (Demons 6 in France and Japan) and Lucio Fulci's Demonia (New Demons in Japan).

Black Demons, directed by Umberto Lenzi, is another contender for the Demons 3 title (the others being the aforementioned The Church, and the made for TV movie Demons 3: The Ogre, which was directed by Lamberto Bava but which shares nothing in common with Demons 1 and 2).

Coming from the director who kick-started the Italian cannibal craze (with Man from Deep River) and who gave us one of the most extreme example of the genre (Cannibal Ferox), it's no surprise that Black Demons delivers several gruesome scenes to delight gorehounds, but the bloodletting is sporadic and doesn't begin until quite a way into the film, so patience is required while Lenzi sets the scene...

Three students - Kevin (Keith Van Hoven), his girlfriend Jessie (Sonia Curtis) and her half-brother Dick (Joe Balogh) - are in Rio de Janeiro, where Dick witnesses a macumba ritual. While driving to another location, the trio's jeep breaks down and they are forced to take refuge at a remote Brazilian plantation, home to young couple Sonia (Juliana Teixeira) and Jose (Philip Murray) and their housemaid Maria (Maria Alves). When Dick plays the recording that he made of the voodoo ceremony, he becomes possessed, and resurrects the bodies of six murdered slaves, who crawl from their graves looking for revenge.

So, essentially, Black Demons is a zombie movie, with the undead picking up a variety of sharp tools with which to kill their victims: Sonia unwisely wanders out into the night (wearing white t-shirt and knickers) and gets her eye gouged out with a hook; Maria also gets her eye gouged out, and has an axe planted in her skull before being hung for good measure. Jose also meets a grisly fate, but he is stabbed in the neck by the possessed Dick.

With a combination of abysmal acting and uninspired direction by Lenzi, Black Demons is not a good film, the only real attractions being the gore and a few moments that are unintentionally funny: a zombie lurking behind Kevin, with knife in hand, is hilarious, as is the scene where the undead suddenly pop up into frame, and the ending, in which Kevin launches Molotov cocktails at the zombies, is completely inept, the bottles of fuel exploding like bombs.

3.5/10, rounded up to 4 for IMDb.