Revisiting the Italian classic, Demons

“Whoever wears it becomes a demon!”
“How do you know?”
“It says here, ‘whoever wears it becomes a demon!’”

Eat your heart out David Mamet. That is some of the sparkling dialogue that enervates an otherwise cracking feature and gateway drug into Italian horror cinema, Demons.

Two college students are wandering around a Berlin train station, when they’re invited to a furtive, invite-only screening to a mystery film. It’s a scenario made all the more mysterious by the fact that the creepy fellow handing out the duckets is sporting a chrome half-mask.

“Are you dressed like this for the promotion of the film?” one of the coeds asks, to which the fellow replies…well, he doesn’t reply…

Ever hear the phrase, “Get while the gettin’s good?” Not these college students, desperate as they are to cut class and do something more fun. Well, they are about to get an education of another sort.

The film screening comprises frat guys, an elderly couple, but also a pimp and a couple of hookers.

In the movie-within-a-movie one of the characters helpfully points out that “demons are instruments of evil!” But, as far as the film is concerned, the most helpful bit of dialogue comes in the form of a stern warning that whoever wears a mask becomes a demon.

Now it just so happens there’s a mask in the Berlin theatre. What a stroke of luck! And when one of the cinemagoers tries it on, well…You don’t need to be a pub trivia champ to figure out things are about to go down.

Demons then goes absolutely haywire, with demons wrecking havoc on the audience with the cinema doors shuttered.

The production is bedlam, a feast of nonstop gore and action.

**** (out of 5)