The Demons (Jesús "Jess" Franco, 1973)

Prolific Spanish exploitation director Jess Franco is in full horndog mode in The Demons, his 1973 French-Portuguese Satanic nunsploitation witch-curse lesbian softcore sexploitation 17th century period piece revenge epic, available in multiple hacked and slashed and panned and scanned versions on VHS, DVD, and whatever surviving prints are floating around. I'm not sure what version my wife and I watched last night on a semi-bootleg DVD copy, but I assume it was the full enchilada pasted together from the various cuts, as the running time was a full two hours, the scope compositions were presented in the correct aspect ratio, and the spoken (and unspoken) languages jumped, seemingly at random, from English to French to Spanish to German to telepathy (the characters were sometimes silently looking at each other as the subtitles churned out unspoken dialogue).

Franco has a sizable cult following, but I'm a bit of a skeptic. I find him too sloppy and repetitive (and zoom-lens happy) to fully embrace, even as his lurid, pulpy b-movies with arty aspirations read on paper like my kind of thing. It's fitting that the Franco movie I do really like out of the handful I've seen, Marquis de Sade's Justine, is considered boring and unrepresentative by the hardcore Franco-heads. I'm not a hater, though. I can always find something to enjoy in Franco, and since The Demons is a '70s Euro-horror with witch curses, sexy nuns, and enthusiastic blasphemy, it kept me happily entertained when it wasn't testing my patience (admittedly a 50/50 split).

The Demons opens with a witch being tortured and then burned at the stake on the orders of Lord Justice Jeffries (Cihangir Ghaffari, a Russian-born Iranian who became a Turkish movie star and then an international character actor and producer whose best-known credits on this side of the tracks are Shaft's Big Score!, Bloodsport, and Abel Ferrara's Fear City). The witch curses everyone watching and says her daughters will get revenge. Jeffries laughs this off because he thinks the old crone was childless, but his witch-torturing accomplice Lady De Winter (Karin Field) is unsettled and urges a search for the offspring. Jeffries relents. Lady De Winter is married to Lord Malcolm De Winter (Howard Vernon), a kindly, absentminded type who just wants to look through his telescope, so she's been making time with another witchfinder, Thomas Renfield (Alberto Dalbés), who gets off on witch torture almost as much as her. He also whips her nude body while she confesses to witchcraft. This is all just a warmup for Lady De Winter, however, who's really into the ladies.

I'm a little fuzzy on how Lady De Winter and Renfield get there, but they somehow receive enough information to check out a pair of sisters, Kathleen (Anne Libert) and Margaret (Carmen Yazalde), who were abandoned and taken in by a convent. The convent is run by Mother Rosalinda (Doris Thomas), a stern taskmaster who nevertheless wears a lot of makeup for a nun and is barely concealing her powerful horniness for her charges. Rosalinda recently got an eyeful of a nude Kathleen writhing in confusing, somewhat aimless ecstasy on her bed in a dream state, which caused her to do some nude, aimless, and confusing bed writhing of her own that same night. There is so much confusing nude bed writhing in this movie, complete with many artless and often out-of-focus zooms in on the butts and pubic hair of the women. Franco may be one of the only filmmakers who can make you mutter to yourself, "Can you please stop showing us this beautiful naked woman and get back to the movie? I'm bored."

Margaret plays by the convent's rules, but Kathleen yearns for worldly pleasures, which allows the devil to get a foothold in her dreams. After a pervathon interrogation from Lady De Winter and Renfield in which Lady De Winter checks to see if the women are still virgins, Kathleen is taken to Lord Justice Jeffries for an inquisition and torture sesh when the Lady's invasive check shows a loss of virginity. Kathleen is then tortured in a variety of nude ways to the arousal of Lady De Winter and Renfield, who both secretly fall in love with her. Their lust is not as secret, however, and the pair start making out in front of everyone after watching some torture. This is the kind of thing that happens when you neglect your wife for a telescope, Lord De Winter. Kathleen enchants nearly every man and woman who lay eyes on her, and she is soon freed by Lord De Winter during a five-minute break from his telescope, causing big problems for everyone.

Meanwhile, Margaret, despondent over her sister's absence, is visited by the spirit or vision or physical embodiment of her long-lost mother, fresh from hell, who fills her in on the revenge plot. Her mother then sends one of Satan's minions to take the younger woman's virginity and switch her allegiances from God to Satan. The sex is apparently good enough to make her change teams, though it looks as unerotic and baffling as most other Franco sex scenes, and soon Margaret is a full-on emissary of hell. 

Her first order of business is having some baffling, unerotic sex with Mother Rosalinda and then hitting the road for Lord Justice Jeffries' place to put the demonic smack down on Jeffries, Lady De Winter, and Renfield for roasting her mom. Will there be time to sex up Lady De Winter first? You bet your ass. Key word: ass. (Lady De Winter doesn't recognize Margaret out of her convent wear until she sees her naked ass.) She's also been delivered a stunning superpower. When she feels like it, she can transform a living person into a cheap Halloween decoration-looking plastic skeleton just by giving that person a smooch on the lips. Nice.

The sisters go on separate journeys, new characters are introduced, and their paths cross again. There are many artless zooms, plodding scenes, hilarious performances, and baffling events along the way. Some of it is boring, some of it is a good time. Sometimes Franco accidentally captures a beautiful or visually powerful image. Sometimes he just zooms in on an out-of-focus partial butt cheek or some pubes for a weirdly long time. These are the kind of things you put up with if you're a Franco fan. The closing moments are pretty satisfying, though. I'll give him that.

So, The Demons. It's an intermittently satisfying lesser melange of Ken Russell's The Devils, Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General, Franco's own Justine (including a similar interlude with a painter), and any random '70s adult film, but you'll never confuse it for any other filmmaker's work, so here's to you, Jess, you dirty old weirdo. They don't make 'em like that anymore. 

Demons (Lamberto Bava, 1985)

Demons, in addition to being a classic of '80s splatter and one of my favorite movies about watching movies in a theater (alongside Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn, Bigas Luna's Anguish, and Joe Dante's Matinee; I have a separate canon for favorite movie theater scenes in movies otherwise not taking place in a theater, movies about making movies, movies about projecting movies, movies about watching movies/hanging out at a drive-in, and movies about watching movies on video or TV; Vernon Zimmerman's Fade to Black is a special case that works for most of these categories), is also a collaboration between several major figures in late 20th century Italian horror cinema. It may be easier to name who didn't work on it, but I'll give a brief(??) rundown.

Director Lamberto Bava, son of the legendary horror filmmaker Mario Bava, previously directed Macabre and A Blade in the Dark (reviewed on this site years ago) and followed Demons with You'll Die at Midnight, Delirium, and, of course, Demons 2. Bava's producer was another legendary horror filmmaker, Dario Argento (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, Suspiria, Tenebre, and the list goes on), and Bava cowrote the screenplay with Argento, Dardano Sacchetti (whose other writing credits include The Cat O' Nine Tails, Twitch of the Death Nerve, Shock, Zombie, Inferno, City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, A Blade in the Dark, and Demons 2), and Franco Ferrini (co-writer of Once Upon a Time in America, Phenomena, Demons 2, Opera, The Church, and Trauma). The music was composed by Claudio Simonetti of Goblin, suppliers of the memorable Suspiria and Dawn of the Dead scores. Simonetti also supplied non-Goblin scores for and/or performed as a musician on multiple Argento films. (Besides Simonetti's music, Demons is jam-packed with synth-pop and metal songs, plus a semi-obscure Rick Springfield tune and Billy Idol's "White Wedding." It should be a mess, but, for Demons, it works.) Bava favorite Gianlorenzo Battaglia handled the stunning cinematography and came back for the sequel (his wildest credit is probably the underwater camera operator on Altman's Popeye).

Did I say this would be brief? The cast includes Nicoletta Elmi, iconic creepy child star of so many '70s Euro-horror cult classics in one of her rare adult roles (she quit acting in the late '80s to become a speech therapist), future Cemetery Man director Michele Soavi, Fiore Argento, daughter of Dario and half-sister of Asia, the striking cult movie legend Geretta Giancarlo aka Geretta Geretta (who shares my birthday along with Harry Dean Stanton, Woody Guthrie, and Ingmar Bergman), Bobby Rhodes, who was brought back for Demons 2 to play a completely different character because he's just that cool, and several actors who aren't horror veterans but look so damn interesting that you'll think you've seen them in other things. I could keep going with the special effects and production design teams, but you have Internet access, so I'll stop here.

Originally intending to make a three-story anthology film, Bava grew so obsessed with Demons that he dropped the other two stories, and I'm so glad he did. There's not much story to Demons, but it's a visual feast of light, shadow, color, neon, architecture, blood, slime, guts, and gore. As beautiful as it is disgusting, Demons never puts something on the screen to move the plot along. Every image is lovingly and carefully framed, photographed, and arranged for maximum visual impact. This is one of those movies that has a mysteriously seductive indefinable atmosphere, a voodoo of location, a palpable presence. It's got that feel. Much like the funk, you can't fake the feel. You've got it or you don't. Demons has it.

Like many great Italian horror movies, Demons doesn't even take place in Italy. The movie opens with college student Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) riding the Berlin U-Bahn to meet up with her friend Kathy (Paola Cozzo). While on the subway platform, Cheryl is followed by a creepy guy with a metal mask covering half his face (Soavi). Her terror dissipates when she realizes Metal Face is handing out free passes to an unnamed movie at the Metropol theater. Bava used the actual Metropol for much of the film, though some interiors were filmed on studio sets in Rome when they really needed to tear shit up and cover shit in goop.

A famous venue in West Berlin that has lived many lives, the Metropol began life as the New Theatre in 1905, a live theater space with a separate concert hall on the top floor. The live theater was turned into a movie theater in 1911, and the concert hall became an operetta in 1914. That top-floor operetta was destroyed in WWII, but the facade and movie theater survived with some repair. The building was renamed the Metropol in 1951, and in 1977, it stopped showing movies and became a disco and live music venue. After the music venue closed in 2000, a porn director turned it into a short-lived sex club called the KitKat Club, someone else turned it into a short-lived upscale nightclub called the Goya in 2005, and yet another owner ran it as a less upscale nightclub until 2014, when the movement of the West Berlin nightlife scene to a different part of the city killed it off. The building rose from the grave in 2019, reopening as the Metropol for live music and events. Besides Demons, the Metropol's other major film appearance was in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire as the venue where Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Crime & The City Solution perform.

Architecture history digression over. Back to the movie. Cheryl convinces Kathy to skip class and go to the Metropol with her. Kathy is kind of whiny about it and hopes it won't be a horror movie but is ultimately convinced. When they arrive, the women are stymied by a Coke machine eating their money, but a couple of young Italian Zack Morris and AC Slater types, George (Urbano Barberini) and Ken (Karl Zinny), save the day. Coke acquired, the women warm up to these chivalrous preppies on the make and don't put up a fuss when the fellas sit next to them. Our other patrons include a no-nonsense pimp named Tony (Rhodes) and two of his stable, Rosemary (Geretta) and Carmen (Fabiola Toledo), a milquetoast young couple, Hannah (Argento) and Tommy (Guido Baldi), hot-tempered middle-aged jerk Frank (Stelio Candelli) and his meek wife Ruth (Nicole Tessier), an insanely cool-looking elderly blind man named Werner (Alex Serra), his caregiver niece Liz (Sally Day), and Liz's secret lover (Claudio Spadaro), and (gestures vaguely) the rest.

Our other important characters are ticket taker and usher Ingrid (Elmi), who also looks insanely cool and retains the mesmerizing screen presence she exhibited as a creepy kid, and a car full of drugged-up street punks who snort cocaine through a straw in a Coke can and break into the theater while on the run from the cops at the worst possible time, causing the demon pandemonium to expand from the theater to the streets. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The theater lobby, in addition to normal theater lobby items like movie posters, for some reason also contains a motorcycle on a pedestal. Hanging from the bike are a katana and a creepy mask. You know, normal movie theater shit. Rosemary is a sassy party type who plays by her own rules (she smokes in the theater even after Ingrid tells her to put out her cigarette), so she immediately picks up the mask and puts it on, though a sharp edge cuts her on the cheek after she takes it off.

Everyone takes their seats and the movie begins. Oh shit, Kathy. It's a horror movie. The film-within-the-film (directed by Soavi) is a competent bit of young people exploring ancient graves biz that looks decent enough to keep the crowd's attention but isn't good enough to steal any thunder from the actual movie called Demons that we are currently watching. When a character finds a creepy mask that looks just like the mask in the lobby, puts it on, and cuts his face in the same spot as Rosemary, Rosemary and Carmen get a little wigged out. The no-nonsense Tony has no time for this nonsense and tells them so. When Rosemary's cheek starts bleeding again, she heads to the bathroom to wash it off and apply some pressure, but of course she turns into a damn demon and our demon pandemonium begins.

The rest of the movie is a battle to the death between theatergoers and demons. It's exciting, violent, splattery as hell, visually thrilling, and logically incoherent. I'm a lover of movies that eschew the conventions and rules of logical storytelling and everyday life, and I almost always prefer the part of the movie where we don't yet have an explanation to the part of the movie that gives us the explanation. Demons never explains. We never find out why the demons exist, what their end goal is, why they picked the theater, who booked the movie, why that guy has a part-metal face (or even who the hell he is), why Ingrid seemed to be in on the conspiracy until she didn't, (BRIEF SPOILER) why a damn helicopter falls through the roof (END OF SPOILER), or how any of this came into being. I love that. Some people find that a weakness. I find it a strength. Each movie make its own rules. There are plenty of movies that make logical narrative sense. We also need some that don't. It makes the world go round, baby. It's real freedom.

I love this movie. I love it so much. (I also like the sequel, though I miss the movie theater setting, but I'll get into that in a later post.) It's dark and funny and beautiful and intense and goofy and brutal and a lovely tribute to the theatrical experience and a great place to point your eyeballs. Yeah, the storytelling's a little thin, but this is a movie about the creation of images. Too much storytelling only gets in the way.