Mini-Review: Demons 6 – De Profundis (1989) [aka. The Scary Refrigerator Man Film]

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.

From http://wtf-film.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/De-Profundis-Black-Cat6.jpg

Blast Forth Into the Corona of an Indigo Sun [Starcrash (1978)]

From http://www.catman.ca/Images/s%20pics/starcrash1979.jpg

Dir. Luigi Cozzi

Italy-USA

From http://cinemapsycho.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/starcrash-1979-rare-oop-b4b9e.jpg?w=300&h=205

On a biased surface view, Starcrash would be dismissed as a terrible Star Wars rip-off. There is a drastic difference however between films that are pure cashgrabs and those, like Starcrash, with more to them. Mere cashgrabs pretty much consist of only exposition dialogue, people sat around chairs or standing saying said dialogue, rudimentary designed monsters and sets; effectively the ready meal mindset to low budget genre filmmaking. Starcrash belongs to the category of this sort of cinema where the director, or whoever is involved in its production, being more experimenting and braver in their work as long as it can be sold on the back of films like Star Wars or Mad Max still. The colours for these films are noticeably brighter and richer, the monsters and vessels of all kinds more chunkier but more unconventional, the dialogue liable to turn exposition into odd pulp poetry with completely made-up names, and the casting of roles liable to lead to fascinating juxtapositions and great scenery chewing. Watching Starcrash, and seeing his films Hercules (1983) and The Adventures of Hercules (1985) with Lou Ferrigno beforehand, it’s clear that the director Luigi Cozzi was obsessed with sci-fi, comic books, Ray Harryhausen films, mythology, prog rock albums and prog rock album covers amongst other things. Rather than the limited palette that the worst of this kind of movie making wallows in, Cozzi’s Starcrash feels like the creation of someone with a wider scope of ideas and influences to draw upon, and a desire to entertain the viewer as much as possible, that is more exhilarating. That it was made on a much lower budget to the Star Wars films made it more distinct, instead of ruining it, and a cult hit.

From http://www.intergalactico.com/images/starcrash_p.jpg

Traversing the ocean of atmosphere-less outer space, criminal pilots Stella Star (Caroline Munro) and psychic Akten (former child preacher turned B-movie star Marjoe Gortner) find themselves avoiding intergalactic prison labour when the Emperor of the galaxy (Christopher Plummer) sends them and two space police officers, including the southern robot Elle, to locate the doomsday weapon of Count Zarth Arn (Joe Spinell), leader of the opposing side of an intergalactic war. Aspects of the film remind of Star Wars, but aside from a lightsabre and a text crawl borrowed from the prop cupboard, Starcrash is its own creation that, despite its minimal plot and breakneck pace, is distinct and imaginative. With names and planet titles chosen, almost stream of consciously, that sound less like rudimentary gibberish but public domain abstract wording, the film manages to touch into a spark in certain pop culture that is hyper imaginative. The dexterity of animation, the fantastical tone of rock music that scrapes past cheesiness into something sublime, the pop art of comic book pages, the creative pulpiness of material usually looked down upon but more often than not more memorable and rich than better praised work. Starcrash is a creation of its time but you don’t get the following in most “rip-off” cinema – glowing blue star ships and purple moons, the atmosphere of an ice planet spinning as quickly above in a superimposition like an image wheel, a giant robotic female Amazon, or Amazon women riding horses that, painted completely red and wearing Chinese dragon masks on their heads, look like peculiar unworldly steeds done in a proto Michel Gondry style. Starcrash has the virtues I wish all pulp, unless it was breaking certain rules on purpose, had and with a great deal of cinema too – colour and colourfulness, depth of visual look, a drawing from real mythology, and if it’s a sci-fi or fantasy work, depictions of worlds and images that are truly alien even on a shoestring budget. Cozzi does all this and even, with co-writing duties with Nat Wachsberger, makes the expository and deus ex machina filled script intentionally so in tone, celebrating the absurdist joy of characters being able to call upon the ability to stop time and having to deal with cosmic cavemen. That it is spoken by actors like Spinell or David Hasselhoff adds to this, their distinct looks and their persona baggage, from Munro’s spirited sexuality to Plummer’s serious nobleness, filling out the thin thread of plot into a full weave even if most of them were dubbed by other people.

From http://www.cinesploitation.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/starcrash4.jpg

Starcrash is not a strained, over-serious film like most blockbusters with the same sort of thin plots are. Even if you can see the joins between the model effects and the actors, within the context of an aesthetic this brightly coloured and designed, it enhances rather than detracts from the tone of the film, more an explosion of colour and look than trying to be a serious, complicated epic like the Star Wars franchise from the same sort of story writing. 

From http://stillsofthenight.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/starcrash-1979-dvdrip-xvid-phreniac-avi_005213480.jpg?w=840