Demonia



The problem with Netflix is that you find yourself hostage to viewing decisions you made months earlier. I added a bunch of Lucio Fulci to my queue, so a bunch of Lucio Fulci is what I'll watch whether I want to or not as they arrive in the mail.

Demonia (1990) must have been made after Fulci stopped being financially successful The movie is shot on video and clearly had no budget for actors or effects. So what's a Fulci film without b-grade stars slumming and no set-pieces. Pretty damned boring. Most Fulci films are bad, but Demonia is boring as well, and makes no narrative sense. But then, if you've seen any Fulci films you could have guessed that last one.


A question mark? Is she a Unitarian nun?

Liza is an archeologist who also participates in the occasional seance. At a particular seance she's tormented by a scene of nuns being crucified in the basement of a ruin on Sicily. Soon after she flies to Sicily to participate in a dig that just happens to be near... guess where?... the same ruin! Except the ruin isn't what the dig is investigating. So it's a coincidence, but not that much of a coincidence... or something.

Liza wanders into the ruin and knocks through to the basement where the nuns were crucified. Then the movie more or less forgets about her. Feh, who needs a main character anyway! For a good long while the movie is a collection of barely connected scenes where certain things happen.

- All the archeologists gather around a fire and sing. This happens a lot.

- The ghost of a naked woman with no head kills an archeologist. With a spear gun. Why a topless, headless ghost would use a spear gun is for philosophers to debate.


See! I'm not making this stuff up!

- A police detective (played by Fulci) questions various red herrings in the spear gun murder.

- There are flashbacks that explain that the ancient nuns had orgies (attended in these scenes by up to four people) where they would kill the men and then burn the babies that resulted from any pregnancies. This may be as close to horror as the movie comes. Not because these scenes are particularly scary, but because they mean, contrary to what any reasonable viewer would have thought when they saw the opening flashback, that crucifying nuns was the right thing to do.

- A woman is killed by her cats, except that they turn into stuffed animals when in close-up.

- Liza wanders around and is vaguely menaced by a different set of red herrings. Occasionally a hand will grab her shoulder and actor Meg Register will favor us with some of her ACTING.


Scary Italian horror movie or Goosebumps on Nickelodeon?

- A man is killed in a meat market.

- In a flashback apropos to nothing, a man is pulled in half by two trees. At least I think it was a flashback. There's certainly no explanation for how this guy got strung between two trees.

For the finale a bunch of the locals try to re-enact the nun crucification, but I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. If you can explain it, you should win a prize. I didn't win that prize, and that's why I got another Lucio Fulci movie in the mail.

Posted: Fri - October 22, 2004 at      

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