Demons 3: The Ogre - 1988

aka Demons III: The Ogre, The Ogre: Demons 3, House of the Ogre and La casa dell'orco

This movie is a bit baffling to me. Not only is it made for TV thus excluding just about everything cool that could happen like violence, nudity and lots'o swearing, but the name seems to be a mistake. I think.

A mistake because I don't know what the fuck that thing in the movie is, but it sure as shit ain't no ogre. Google ogre. Go ahead, I'll wait. You got a picture of some hulking monster, maybe with a club. Something that resembles the idiot from the Shrek movies. Shrek is an ogre. He's green, he is not too smart, he's mostly just muscle, big teeth, the whole package in other words.

The thing in this movie, I don't know what it is. It honestly looks more like a bad witch costume. A male witch. It has a weird wooden looking face, it is light on it's feet and even runs. Imagine a huge ogre running! NO! They're supposed to be bulky and slow. Actually, maybe the thing in this movie is supposed to be a goblin?! That makes a lot more sense.

I don't mean to rag on this movie too much. It's actually okay for a made for TV movie. It plays like a mystery thriller more than a horror film. You have a young female author that decides to take a vacation in a house out in the middle of nowhere with her husband and child. She is a writer of adult fiction, even writing horror novels...wait a minute. This is the same plot as Howling 4! In Howling 4 a young female horror writer vacations in some rural shithole town outside of LA and gets hunted by werewolves....in The Ogre a young female horror writer vacations in some shithole outside of rural Italy and is terrorized by an ogre. Hmmmmmmm....

Then lets see how much these plots continue to be the same. Writer starts seeing and hearing things, no one believes her and blames her overactive imagination. Writer starts investigating the area they are staying in and finds freaky shit. Writer finally uncovers the truth in the last like 15 minutes of the movie and that's where the pay off is. Yeah, they're pretty similar.

What The Ogre has going for it though is a cool house, a pretty well acted crew, a solid directing job by Lamberto Bava, and a super cool 80's music theme that I guarantee you'll be humming after. So it's not terrible. It's just, you know, not good. And it's definitely NOT an Ogre, nor is it worthy of being called Demons 3. (which, to be fair, it is normally not called Demons 3. I think some jerk-off somewhere was just being, well, a jerk off)