Demons 2 (1986)

After watching the first one, I just had to take a look at the sequel Demons 2, a movie I've never been especially fond of. It's still not a great movie, but it's at least a little better than I expected it to be. Maybe I've just gotten older and realized that gore isn't everything... ha ha, who am I kidding? This is a frigging Demons-movie! It should have gore... but no.

This is more or less a blueprint of the first one, with some of the same actors, and just one a different location. Here the demon-plague starts when the sequel to the first productions movie-within-in-the-movie is showing on television. But this time the characters is trapped inside a high-rise residential apartment building instead. A birthday-party becomes a massacre when lovely Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni first watches the movie and gets attacked by a demon crawling out from the TV-set, and then we follow a gang of gym-monkeys (lead by an extremely overacting Bobby Rhodes), a pregnant woman and her husband, a little boy home alone and a couple of other meatheads.

The worst thing with Demons 2 is the lack of gore. Sure, there's some slimy-transformations and some creatures getting wacked, but still... this is a more or less gore-less movie with very little blood. This is really a pity, because the energy is high, the attacks are fun and creative - but seem less powerful because of this detail. The attack at the gym and the garage could have been a fantastic gore-fest, but instead it's just a bunch of half-naked muscles-cows screaming like little girls and nothing more. But on the other hand, the movie looks great and the demons are as cool as ever. The most freaky character is when the little boy becomes a demon! He's so bizarre, so damn creepy and strange. It's the best sequence in the whole movie, and the stuff after when a Gremlins-like monster is attacking the pregnant women is fun too.

Lamberto Bava seem to have more control over the direction here too, and it's a lot more coherent and thought through than the first movie. The lighting is a bit colder, less over-the-top and with more footage concentrating on tension rather than monster-mayhem. But I miss the gore, I miss the awesome decapitations and skin bursting like balloons...

Well, you can't have it all. But the lesson I learned today is that some movies actually gets a little bit better after a few years. It's not a better or more entertaining movie than Demons, but it's not a bad little monster-puppy after all.