Demonstone (Andrew Prowse, 1990)

Demonstone aka Heartstone aka Deathstone, an Australian production set in the Philippines with an American and Filipino cast, blends supernatural horror, action, and a military variation on the buddy cop template to neither great nor terrible effect, and director Andrew Prowse has a generically perfunctory visual style that looks like '80s syndicated TV. Brian Trenchard-Smith (Dead End Drive-In, BMX Bandits, Stunt Rock) was originally hired to direct the film but unfortunately had to turn it over to Prowse shortly after production began due to a medical issue. Trenchard-Smith, especially at that time, was a tremendous visual stylist and someone who knew how to turn low budgets into gold, and it's a bummer that we'll never get to see his take on the material.

Nevertheless, the movie as it exists does have a few major things going for it. The primary villain, a corrupt senator secretly running a weapons-smuggling ring (Joonee Gamboa), is named Belfardo. Sen. Belfardo also has approximately 20,000 relatives in his gang, also named Belfardo. It never stops being funny when the other characters say "Belfardo," and they say it a lot. Depending on the actors' enunciations and the poor sound quality in the print I was able to watch, it often sounded like "El Farto" or "Bill Farto." This is a great time for everybody. The other major asset is R. Lee Ermey, who seems to have been given the freedom to improvise most of his lines. This is speculation on my part, but his dialogue has more color and flavor than everyone else's. You get such stupid gems as his response when someone tells him he probably knows "half the whores in Manila": "I support half the whores in Manila. I know all of them."  Or his verbal scrap with a Marine admiral who tells him he needs to fix a major problem or the admiral will have his "family jewels bronzed and put on my desk to use as a paperweight": "You already bronzed my family jewels last week. This time you'll have to bronze a chunk out of my ass." This is the kind of ridiculous dialogue an action-based b-movie needs.

Demonstone's overly busy plot begins with a flashback to the late 1500s. A warlord and his boys attack some mystics so the warlord can steal a fancy-pants amulet in the possession of the chief mystic. Not content to 23 skidoo after taking the amulet, the warlord and his henchmen dig a grave, throw the mystic inside, and set him on fire. Rough stuff. As he burns, the mystic curses the warlord and his entire bloodline. Pandemonium ensues.

Back in the present, a professor named Olmeda (Rolando Tinio) and a team of archeologists dig up some buried items (including the amulet) in a cave in the countryside a few hours from Manila. A TV news reporter, Sharon Gale (DeepStar Six's Nancy Everhard) is covering the story and, in a lapse of journalistic ethics, feels compelled to swipe the amulet before the professor and his team see it. Unfortunately for her, the spirit of the aggrieved mystic uses the amulet to possess her in order to carry out the destruction of the warlord's bloodline. Guess which family descends from that bloodline? That's right. The Belfardos. The mystic's spirit mostly lets Sharon live her ordinary life, but when it's Belfardo-killin' time, her eyes turn white, a white light flashes, and Belfardos get ripped apart. She has no memory of any of this afterwards.

Meanwhile, a turf war between Manila's two major gangs causes bodies to stack up all over the city. A former Marine investigator, Andy Buck (Jan-Michael Vincent), is still keeping tabs on the case. One night, while staking out a bar, he sees some of Belfardo's boys accost a young Marine, Tony (Pat Skipper). Multiple bar fights ensue, a weird bright white light flashes, and Tony wakes up in a room full of dead Belfardos. The Filipino investigators arrive on the scene and assume Tony is the killer, but a contingent of U.S. Marine bigwigs arrive to assert jurisdiction, including Col. Joe Haines (Ermey), and spirit Tony away to the base.

Joe and Andy are old pals, and they team up to try to get to the bottom of the strange killings. They know Tony couldn't have done it himself, but the Filipino residents, already angry at the presence of the American military, want some justice and organize mass protests. Joe and Andy also get on the bad side of the admiral (Peter Brown), who functions as a sort of exasperated chief detective in the buddy-cop paradigm, and Sen. Belfardo, who especially hates Andy. Ermey and Vincent have good chemistry as the two wise-cracking Marines who play by their own rules.

Vincent, a charismatic '70s movie star and '80s network TV star, burned his Hollywood bridges after years of drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence arrests and was in the start of his long b-movie decline, his performances becoming increasingly halfhearted and lazy as his substance abuse, legal issues, and complications from three near-fatal car accidents took a toll on his ability to do the work. (In one notorious role a few years after this one, he sits at a kitchen table reading the newspaper in almost all his scenes so he can read his unmemorized lines.) Though his slurry line deliveries in Demonstone sound like he's just downed a few cocktails, his performance is energetic and likable, and he bounces off Ermey well. The old Jan-Michael Vincent is still visible. (His later roles can be pretty rough and kind of sad, though Vincent Gallo used him well in Buffalo '66 as the bowling alley manager.)

Back in the tangled Demonstone web, Andy and Sharon have an on-again, off-again romantic relationship (oh shit), Sharon doesn't know she's been possessed by the amulet and is killing Belfardos (oh shiit), one of Belfardo's sons is getting married this weekend and Sharon is invited (oh shiiit), Sharon brings Andy to the lavish reception (oh shiiiit), and Tony escapes from the base and steals Joe's car (oh shiiiiit).

Though Prowse presents it all in a visually flat style that is not as impactful or as exciting as it should be, I was entertained by Ermey's wisecracks, the near-constant mention of the name "Belfardo," a moment where the severed hand and forearm of a Belfardo continues to fire a gun, a couple of the shootouts, a chase sequence in which Tony gets a little too big for his britches and taunts the Belfardos after narrowly escaping, and a scene in which Ermey wears skinny white shorts and a very busy shirt (almost as busy as the plot) he may have purchased at Dan Flashes (it probably cost $1,000 because the pattern's so complicated). I'm not used to seeing R. Lee Ermey in wacky duds like that, and I'm still coming to terms with it, but I love it.

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.