We're back this week with another slice of regional DIY insanity, this time from the prolific master(?) of shot-on-video straight-to-video weirdness, Donald Farmer, the small-town Kansas native who has been cranking out his own inimitable brand of mostly horror indies since the late '80s after several 8mm shorts in the '70s. Farmer at various points has made movies in or near the Los Angeles and Miami areas, and I believe he's presently based somewhere in Tennessee. He's still at it, and his post-pandemic credits include Catnado (tag line: "It's like Sharknado, but with cats"), Debbie Does Demons, and Bigfoot Exorcist.
Demon Queen is Farmer's second feature (if a 54-minute movie with a five-minute closing credit sequence can be called a feature), following Cannibal Hookers, reviewed on this site in 2020. Demon Queen doesn't have the pizzazz of Cannibal Hookers, and at no point would you ever confuse it for anything resembling a good movie, but Farmer's brand of do-it-yourself confident incompetence is highly amusing to me. This guy shot this stuff on video with a mostly amateur cast and crew and somehow got it distributed and into video stores. I love that.
Demon Queen begins with a drunk out-of-towner bringing a mysterious woman named Lucinda (Mary Fanaro) to his dimly lit, cheap motel room somewhere on the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale or Miami. They have sex, but Lucinda follows up the sexy times by biting open the man's chest, removing his heart, rubbing the heart on her breasts (featuring a two-minute breast closeup), and chewing on the heart.
The next day, Lucinda wanders past a small-time coke dealer getting his ass kicked by his two suppliers for being late in his payments. Lucinda chomps down on the neck of one of the suppliers while the other one runs off. (By the way, the supplier who gets chomped gets one of my favorite credits in the opening sequence: "Featuring Clif Dance as Bone." Is "Cliff" spelled with a second f in the closing credits? You bet your ass.)
The coke dealer, Jesse (Dennis Stewart), is mesmerized by Lucinda and appreciative of her intervention in the beatdown. When he offers her a favor, she asks if she can crash at his place. He enthusiastically agrees, much to the annoyance of his coked-up girlfriend Wendy (Patti Valliere). Lucinda proceeds to get on Wendy's nerves, bedazzle Jesse, and chew on the chests and necks of dudes all over the southeast Florida region.
Some of these dudes die, but most of them reanimate as demonic zombies who go on neck- and chest-chewing sprees of their own, mostly targeting women. Lucinda also appears to Jesse in bizarre and lengthy dream sequences, which should scare him off, but he's under her erotic spell.
The cheap shot-on-video look is, for me, the most compelling aspect of the movie. It's slightly above camcorder-level in quality, and the places Farmer films haven't been prettied up by set and production designers or cinematographers' filters. This is an accurate document of a slice of southeast Florida (and a Nashville video store) in the mid-1980s. This is what the motels, apartments, shopping malls, and office buildings looked like. This kind of thing is so fascinating to me.
