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| From http://bis.cinemaland.net/poster/demons6.jpg |
Dir. Luigi Cozzi
Italy
I purposely found this film to
view after becoming fond of Starcrash
(1978) director Luigi Cozzi, but
this film is a reminder that even directors you like, great auteurs or workmen,
can fail hideously. This and Zombie 3
(1988) within March for me has shown that any director in the Italian genre
industry can fail and that, to my belief, the culture of the late eighties and
its popular trends may have been what killed it off after being so illustrious
beforehand. Whether Mother of Tears (2007),
Dario Argento’s official third film
in his Three Mothers Trilogy, looks good in comparison to this unofficial third
film is yet to be accounted for until I view it, but Cozzi sadly dropped the bar low enough for the really average
directors to make better films than Demons
6. Set in a world where Dario Argento’s
Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980) exist within it, a
famous director and his scriptwriter decide to use material from the same
source Argento’s films came from,
planning to make a film about an evil with called Levana if a famous producer
is willing to fund the production. The director’s wife, planned to play the
witch, is beset by troubling hallucinations however and threats to herself and
her young child by Levana.
The film, if it was just this
basic plotline, is not good. It has some style, but it seems like the artistry
of even the most lurid of Italian cinema was bled out of this baring some
bleached out lighting. Thirty minutes in its still going through introductory exposition,
as a ninety or less minute feature, and it has none of the atmosphere of the
best of Italian horror, believing cheesy hair metal riffs are what jolts the
viewer. Only Demons (1985) and Demons 2 (1986) have made heavy metal
work in Italian horror films from what I’ve seen, and those films were not
attempting to be atmospheric but balls-out splat fests rather than spine chilling.
The other films I’ve seen, baring maybe Phenomena
(1985) and its lunatic ending, did not know how to use this music at all,
like most films do, and are marred by them. This is also a film where it is
supposed to be scary that the female protagonist talks to a repair man fixing
her fridge...only for him not to have existed at all and vanishing into thin
air. As I have added to the title of this film, Demons 6 attempts to bring refrigerator repairmen to the silver
screen as a new terror, and that concept in principle shows all that is wrong
with this film in its dull entirety with this perfect centrepiece. It attempts
to do the same with model trains too, but while Mario Bava made toys placed in an order unnerving in his last film Shock (1977), Demons 6 feels lazy and lifeless. There is none of the childish
imagination of the other Cozzi films
I’ve seen, or the blistering colours and production design. And then there’s
the whole story of the film. In something like Starcrash the unexpected tangents felt like a celebration of them
for the sake of it like in a flash of pulpy storytelling or how a child adds
more and more to a story they’re telling as they go along. Demons 6, right from the first images of outer space and a cosmic foetus,
for the lack of a politer phrasing, feels like it is pulling plot twists out of
its arse in panicked and gibbering desperation. More arbitrary for the annoying
‘Is it all a dream?’ moments, it wobbles between supernatural horror, cultism,
science fiction, and even Edgar Allen Poe’s
The Black Cat, only really shown through
images of cats, and feels like an indigestible hodgepodge of bits. By its end, Demons 6: De Profundis, is just a
confused, rambling mess, not an abstract and haunting horror film that Italy
can make (and Argento did). It’s completely
awful and you should be watching Luigi
Cozzi’s Hercules (1983) with Lou Ferrigno instead.
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| From http://wtf-film.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/De-Profundis-Black-Cat6.jpg |
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