Demons 2 (Lamberto Bava, 1986)

Demons 2 gets most of the Demons filmmaking gang back together, including director Lamberto Bava, screenwriters Bava, Dario Argento, Dardano Sacchetti, and Franco Ferrini, producer Argento, cinematographer Gianlorenzo Battaglia, editors Franco Fraticelli and Piero Bozza, and production designer/art director Davide Bassan, with mostly excellent results, though there is a slight diminishing return due to familiarity replacing novelty, we get even less character development, and the setting (a high-rise apartment building) is not explored in as much detail as I would've preferred. Still, this is a freaky, kinetic, neon-drenched good time.

Two Demons leads even make repeat appearances, despite their characters getting murdered by, and then transformed into, demons in the first film. (They were then killed a second time in demonic form.) In the first film, Lino Salemme played the all-nonsense Ripper, member of a coke-snorting gang of punks who break into the movie theater mid-demonic onslaught. In Demons 2, he plays a no-nonsense security guard for the apartment building, billed only as "Security Guard" despite a decent amount of screen time. Most memorably, Bobby Rhodes is back. He was the no-nonsense pimp Tony in Demons, and this time he plays Hank, a just-a-tiny-bit-of-nonsense-but-mostly-no-nonsense personal trainer in the building's gym. He spends the first half of the film putting leotard-clad babes and oiled-up shorts-wearing hunks through their workout paces and the second half leading his fitness army into heated demon-fighting battle in the parking garage. In both films, if demonic shit goes down, Bobby Rhodes is the guy you want telling you what to do. Demons are probably going to kick your ass anyway, but at least you have a chance.

I already wrote about how much I love Demons and its movie theater setting, but Demons 2 has another great location in its big-city high-rise apartment building. I like these early scenes where we briefly get to know different apartment dwellers and employees and the layout of the building, and I wish we'd had a bit more of that before the demon chaos begins. As much as I love demon chaos, I think a few more party scenes and characters living their lives in the other apartments would have contributed to the atmosphere and made the demon chaos rip even harder.

Keeping the action in Germany but swapping Berlin for Hamburg (with additional studio shooting in Rome), Demons 2 takes place on a hopping Friday night in the high-rise. Teenager or early twentysomething (it's a little vague) Sally Day (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni) is having a fancy-dress birthday party at her apartment (her parents skedaddle for an Oktoberfest-ish celebration a block away) and her fellow twentysomething teens keep arriving, to the chagrin of security guard Salemme, who has no patience for their elevator shenanigans (a couple of jokers keep pushing different buttons). We also get to know elevator-phobic sex worker Mary (Virginia Bryant), arriving at the same time as the teens to meet a client, a college-student couple, Hannah (Nancy Brilli) and George (David Edwin Knight), expecting their first baby (and whose apartment is a riot of neon), a family sitting down to dinner whose young daughter Ingrid is played by Asia Argento, and a single woman with a big fluffy dog. I can't forget the young boy, Tommy (Marco Vivio), neglectfully left alone by his parents, who has this incredible phone call, heard only from his end: "No, my mom is not home. ... No, my dad's not home, either. .... I'm here all alone. Goodbye!" I don't think the night would have ended well for the young lad even without the demons.

Even though it's her birthday, the cake has arrived, the Goth and alt-rock jams are blasting (Demons 2 swaps the first film's heavy metal and synth-pop for The Smiths, Art of Noise, Peter Murphy, Gene Loves Jezebel, Fields of the Nephilim, Dead Can Dance, Love and Rockets, and The Cult), she's young and pretty, and her friends are all here, Sally is losing it. She's a very high-strung person who changes moods on a dime, and she flips out about how much she hates her dresses before being cajoled by a friend to leave her bedroom and get to partying. While briefly forgetting her cares and dancing to The Smiths' "Panic," the phone rings. She ignores it, so another partygoer answers. He tells the caller to come on over to the party. Sally asks him who called, and flips the eff out when she hears the answer. "Jacob? You told Jacob he could come to my party? Jacob?" Apparently, Jacob was not on the guest list, leading to a spectacular meltdown in which Sally announces the party's end and kicks everyone out before storming back to her bedroom.

Since it's Friday night and the party is just kicking into gear, everyone ignores Sally and keeps on partying, though the bespectacled young man who answered the phone is sent out into the street to keep Jacob away. Sally recovers quickly and happily chills out in her room watching a horror movie about demons on Channel 12. 

Most of the apartment dwellers are watching that same demon movie (oh shiiit), including Ingrid, the woman with the dog, and the unsupervised little boy who gave out too much info over the phone. When a demon on the TV screen decides to break the fourth wall and change locations from Channel 12 to Sally's boudoir, pandemonium ensues, leading to an all-out assault on the apartment denizens from the demons and the infected humans who become demons.

Continuing Demons' refreshing lack of explanation and narrative logic, we never learn why the demons arrive or what they want and we also don't know why that, exactly one time in each film, one demon bursts out of another demon. It's just a cool gag we all enjoy and no one needs to know why it happened. Both movies are a riot of pure style and action, with no attention paid to back story or subtext and little attention paid to character development. It's hilarious that both movies have four screenwriters.

I don't know if more would have been revealed if Demons 3 had happened, but I hope not. That movie was supposed to take place on a volcanic desert island with most of the demonic action occurring on an airplane that was forced to make an emergency landing. The screenplay was eventually scrapped, with a new Demons 3 screenplay set in a church. Bava lost interest in the project and handed it over to Michele Soavi (who'd acted in the first Demons and directed the film-within-a-film segments). Soavi changed the focus and retooled it as The Church, a standalone film unconnected to the previous two. Yes, our characters get trapped in a church with some demons in the final third, but these demons look nothing like the ones in the Bava films, and the rest of the movie has way too much plot and backstory to ever be a Demons movie (though it's just as loose with narrative logic and way more incoherent, which are not criticisms if you regularly watch '70 and '80s Italian horror).

Back to 2. If you liked Demons, you'll probably have a good time here. There are a few baffling choices (why make such a big deal out of Jacob and his impending arrival only for him to have an anti-climactic fender-bender with the parents of the neglected boy and then promptly disappear from the rest of the movie?), and it's not quite as splattery (the filmmakers toned it down a bit to avoid the censorship battles of the first film), but it looks great, it's exciting, the setting is almost as much fun as the movie theater setting in the first film, and the final scene in a TV studio is delightfully eccentric. Both movies are a blast and recommended to anyone who enjoys '80s and/or Italian horror.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Victor Fleming, 1941)

Filmmaker Victor Fleming had a landmark 1939, with sole directorial credit on both The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. The truth is a bit more complicated, and both films had troubled productions with multiple directors. Here's the abbreviated, but not that abbreviated, history: Wizard of Oz producer Mervyn LeRoy fired original director Richard Thorpe a few weeks into filming after deciding that Thorpe was moving too quickly and carelessly and getting lousy performances. LeRoy replaced Thorpe with George Cukor, a much stronger filmmaker, but as soon as Cukor got things rolling on Oz, the studio moved him to Gone with the Wind, which he'd already agreed to direct and which was now finally ready to shoot after many delays. Fleming replaced Cukor but followed Cukor's blueprint. Cukor clashed creatively with producer/studio executive David O. Selznick and star Clark Gable (though in Gable's case, it was also homophobic discomfort with Cukor's homosexuality) on the Gone with the Wind set, and despite intense lobbying from pro-Cukor stars Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland, Selznick fired Cukor and replaced him with, you guessed it, Victor Fleming. Fleming had finished the color sequences in Oz, but most of the black-and-white Kansas-set scenes still needed to be shot, so another great filmmaker, King Vidor, took over and directed what would become the first third of Oz. Fleming, handling the bulk of Oz and Wind back-to-back, crashed out from exhaustion, and yet another director, Sam Wood, took over for three weeks of filming before Fleming came back to take Gone with the Wind over the finish line. It's incredible that both films were even semi-competent with all the behind-the-scenes musical chairs, but the fact that they became enduring cultural landmarks is miraculous (though I'm a much bigger fan of The Wizard of Oz; I find Gone with the Wind historically fascinating but morally noxious and aesthetically overstuffed).

Fleming wisely took 1940 off, but he eventually followed up his 1939 double whammy with his second Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation (after 1934's Treasure Island), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Though I prefer John S. Robertson's 1920 silent version with John Barrymore and, especially, Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 pre-Code version with Fredric March (one of the great American movies, in my opinion) (an additional shoutout to Hammer's excellent 1971 gender-bending take, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde), Fleming's approach to the material yields some impressive results and maintains the overwhelming darkness of its predecessors, despite having to water a few things down due to Hays Code restrictions. These early Jekyll and Hyde movies are far bleaker and more intense and overtly sexual than many contemporaneous horror films and appear to be speaking to a primarily adult audience.

Spencer Tracy in the title role(s) may seem on paper like more of a commercial choice than an artistic one. That's not a slam on Tracy as an actor, who was mostly excellent, but he specialized in light, sophisticated comedies and as righteous crusaders of justice in heavy dramas, and it's hard to picture him going full Hyde. He pulls it off in a major way, though, and his Jekyll/Hyde is strengthened by the moral ambiguities flavoring his portrayal. The point of his research is trying to separate the good and evil that share space inside all of us. His Jekyll is not a cartoonishly aw-shucks embodiment of goodness contrasting with the monstrous Hyde but is instead a flawed but mostly decent human being whose serious weaknesses become the bedrock of Hyde's personality.

Tracy's Jekyll is a successful young doctor on the rise who cares about the people in his life and is deeply in love with his fiancée Beatrix (Lana Turner), but he's also a bit obsessive about his crackpot research and loves to shock the high society normies with a bit of the ol' proto-Ricky Gervais "Oh, am I offending you? How cheeky and daring of me!" He also has some trouble hiding his lust, and his PDA moments with Beatrix scandalize Beatrix's father Sir Charles (Donald Crisp) despite his protestations often beginning with the phrase, "I'm more broadminded than most, but... ." When Jekyll and his best friend and colleague Dr. John Lanyon (Ian Hunter, not the Mott the Hoople singer) rescue a woman, Ivy (Ingrid Bergman), from an attacker, Jekyll basks in the glow of her flirtations, insists he can handle escorting the woman to her apartment alone, lets her hit on him for an extended period of time before letting on that he's a doctor and needs to return home, and reciprocates her kiss before his disapproving friend returns and convinces him to skedaddle.

Ingrid Bergman's performance has been criticized because of her not particularly convincing attempt at a Cockney accent, which often slips back into her natural Swedish cadence, but I think her overall performance is so good, the less than stellar accent is pretty easy to overlook, especially since she mostly abandons it after her initial few scenes. She does so much with her facial expressions and her emotional delivery, and the camera loves her, so I would argue that her performance here is underrated. 

Lana Turner is also great in what could have been a boring, thankless, stand-by-your-man performance. Her character has a less interesting lifestyle than Ivy's, cinematically speaking, but Turner gives Beatrix real life. She also does so much with her facial expressions, and, again, the camera loves her. She injects a stock character with real personality and flavor, and her and Tracy have good chemistry. She's a good girl devoted to her father, her future husband, the community, and the church, but she also gets to display some reciprocal lust for her fiancé and delivers solid emotional pain when Jekyll starts acting in ways she can't understand. These are not milquetoast sexless characters driven by plot machinations. They convince you they're living it.

Fleming also spices things up with some nutty dream/fantasy seizure-visions Jekyll experiences as he's turning into Hyde that somehow got past the Hays Code enforcers. They may have been a little too strange for the imagination-deficient censors to know what they were looking at, including Jekyll floating above Ivy and Beatrix while the women are in cleavage-baring tops, Jekyll atop a carriage whipping two horses who turn into the bare-shouldered women, and a giant champagne bottle with Ivy's head as the cork, which pops off as champagne spews into the air. Code standards forced Fleming to change Ivy's profession from sex worker to barmaid, and there's a lot less skin than in the Mamoulian version, but these expressionist fantasy sequences somehow squeaked through.

Fleming's two most famous movies as director are producer-driven for-hire projects that had a strong visual design already in place when Fleming came aboard, but Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde shows off what he was capable of when he had more control. (I love The Wizard of Oz, but it's not particularly representative of Fleming's overall body of work.) Fleming is great with atmosphere and mood, and he excels at emotionally intimate scenes between two or three characters. You really feel Hyde's mistreatment of Ivy here (often to an uncomfortable degree) and the spark between Jekyll and Beatrix, and that intimate scale reflects my two lust-filled pre-Code Fleming favorites, Bombshell and Red Dust, the first a screwball comedy and the latter a brutal, offbeat melodrama, both starring Jean Harlow. Cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg (Fritz Lang's Fury and Cukor's The Women and Gaslight) does wonders with light and darkness, and is equally strong with interior and exterior scenes and closeups and long shots, and filmmaker and cinematographer complement each other's work here.

A few of the transformation scenes haven't aged well (though they still look better than the vast majority of visually dead, untactile, revoltingly empty 21st century digital effects) and the movie runs a bit long, but this is otherwise a strong interpretation of the Jekyll and Hyde story. Sure, there are several others I'd put ahead of it, especially the 1931 version, but that's just a testament to how many good and great Jekyll and Hyde movies we have. This one is a worthy effort and still somewhat undervalued.