I was adding movies to my Amazon wish list the other day, and I noticed that at some point I'd added Demons. That 1985 Italian horror film that I loved, and that in retrospect gets 5 stars. The point is I never really finished that series, I was too over-joyed with the newness of the blog I didn't want to get bogged down in a series, plus I wasn't really watching movies on YouTube. I watched Demons 2, and it was an awesome though not as great sequel.
Demons 3: The Ogre was a decent enough movie, it felt like one of those Sci Fi originals I used to watch back in the day, and that movie started the "reason" I wasn't going to finish the Demons series: they stopped being true sequels, and just were movies where monsters existed in one form or another. It was the the same with Demons 6: De Profundis where there wasn't a clear monster in the movie at all, the evilness was more abstract.
But who am I leave a franchise hanging with 4 movies having gone unwatched? Despite the fact I have tons of other movies to watch and I could've easily seen another movie by Robert Emenegger, I YouTubed the fuck out of Demons 4 as I'm going to call it and watched it. This movie was not anything like a Demons sequel, so why I refer to it as Demons 4 and why it ever got called that is a pure mystery. What's equally confusing is the alternate names. The Sect (La Setta in Italian) made no sense as there is no sect in the film, The Devil's Daughter made no sense since the girl in the film was good and was actually going to be the MOTHER of Satan had an old man gotten his way. Maybe they just made the film with no intention of ever naming it. Hey, musicians release untitled songs all the time, why can't directors do the same?
Where the Demons sequels got further and further from the source movie, this one follows that trend. This movie has no demons in it, in fact the closest we get is an old man. Hm. Old man versus some manic monster from Demons 1985...who wins....who the hell wins? Not the audience, I can tell ya that much.
Most of the movie is the slow mystery of the old man. Who is he, why is he all crazy, and why is he obsessed with these weird things? In the first part of the film, the main character Miriam almost hits him with her car. Feeling bad she takes him home and lets him stay there, he sneaks into her room that night and puts a cool looking bug in her nose. This will eat her brain? That is definitely said at one point. That and it will make her evil...and it'll make her give birth to Satan's kid...? It's generally vague, but in no movie is a bug crawling up your nose the start of something GOOD, so we know whatever it is it's bad.
It was directed by Dario Argento collaborator Michele Soavi, and the technicality of it is ok. Decent enough acting and pacing, I guess. But it just feels like a lot of it is waiting for something to happen. Like the recent movie Killings at Outpost Zeta, they had enough for like 45 minutes and the rest of it is just ummmmm and huhhhhhh and hmmmmm. Nothing really happens in most scenes.
As a movie separated from Demons it wasn't good, so in comparison to Demons it's awful. But it was never intended to be a sequel, so it gets cut some slack. I guess it can have a whole 2 stars, for the good actors, the good directing, etc. But generally, just not entertaining enough, sorry, try again.
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