Editorial Reviews

In Demons a packed cinema is overrun by a group of zombies and there is no way out. In Demons 2 a young girl’s birthday party becomes a nightmare when the title creatures manage to evoke demonic possession via a television set. Yes, really…

1985’s Demons remains the best Italian horror movie that Dario Argento never made. Instead he produced it, with Lamberto Bava stepping behind the camera and no doubt making his late father proud with a roller-coaster ride full of non stop special effects, illogical set pieces and an oddly believable atmosphere of dread and helplessness.

Severely indebted to Night of the Living Dead, the film finds art mirroring reality when a variety of celluloid beasts somehow escape into the real world at a sold out movie premiere. As with the Romero classic, Demons then concentrates on the plight of the survivors as they attempt to bond together and get out of the locked theater in one piece.

Although CGI has made the feature’s once-spectacular transformations look a tad dated, there is still plenty to enjoy here, including Bava’s nihilistic approach to the action and an unexpectedly haunting, post-apocalyptic ending. Sadly, the soundtrack is peppered with awful 80s hair metal bands and a synthesizer score that induces an instant migraine.

However, considering that Bava’s creepy creations can spread their disease through a simple drop of blood it is also easy to view Demons as the main influence on 28 Days Later. Interestingly, both films also feature speeded–up zombies and a male/female duo that is forced to battle against seemingly impossible odds.

Although the bigger budgeted Demons 2 (1987) features a young Asia Argento, this outing has less to recommend to it - including a hair-brained plot in which a television set acts as a portal for the zombies to once again invade the real world. This time around the creatures take hold of a multi-storey apartment block but, aside from featuring similarly spooky “demons”, this follow-up has nothing in common with the original and, stupidly, introduces some ridiculous slapstick comedy.

Still, if you can handle the tongue-in-cheek tone of the flick, and a soundtrack just as bad as the original, there is some fun to be had with a scene of demonic child birth and an insane sequence when the monsters invade a gymnasium full of buffed up weight lifters. However, what makes both Demons movies so oddly intriguing is that literally no one is safe - including children, dogs, pregnant women and blind people. Really, these might be the two most politically incorrect horror flicks of their decade.

Plot Summary

• Tagline: The Nightmare Returns
• Plot Outline: A group of tenants and visitors are trapped in a 10-story high-rise apartment building infested with demons who proceed to hunt the dwindling humans down.
• Plot Synopsis: A documentary is shown on TV of group of teens who investigate the legendary forbidden zone, in which once took place a Demon infestation (see Demoni I). When finding a lifeless corps of a demon, one of the teens causes the resurrection it, and the demon makes it's way into the nearby world by TV-broadcast... An unlucky girl, having her birthday-party at that time, gets posessed by the demon while watching the documentary and soon the complete building in which she lives turns into a living nighmare....

Product Details

• Actors: David Edwin Knight, Nancy Brilli, Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni, Bobby Rhodes, Asia Argento
• Directors: Lamberto Bava
• Format: Color, Dolby, Letterbox, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1)
• Subtitles: -
• Disc Origin: Region 1 (USA) Original
• Region: All
• Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1 (Letterbox)
• Number of discs: 1 (1 x DVD5)
• Rating: UNRATED
• Studio: Anchor Bay
• DVD Release Date: March 16, 1999
• Run Time: 91 minutes