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.