An Introduction
An Introduction
I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided to try to start blogging about all the movies I’m watching for my A Movie A Day challenge. Naturally I’ll need to keep them fairly brief since I’ll hopefully doing at least one every day, so I’m going to treat these more as personal journal entries rather than straight-up reviews. That means these will be completely subjective musings about my personal experiences while attempting to watch at least 366 movies in 2020. That will also allow me to blog about the same movie more than once without just posting the exact same thing when I inevitably watch the same movie over and over again. I might be watching the same movie, but the experience will always be unique. That’s good, because the very first experience I’ll be writing about involves a movie that I’ve seen bunches of times and will see bunches more!
Demons – A Movie A Day #77
Demons – A Movie A Day #77
March is my birth month, and even though my actual birthday is closer to the end of the month than the beginning, I wanted to start with a movie I knew I’d love. It was also the Sunday night before another long work week, and that was just one more reason to start it off right. For me, a good start will always involve Italian horror, the 80s, movies, demons, and lots of gore. Lamberto Bava’s Demons has all of those things in beautiful excess.
I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Demons, but the number is pretty high. There are definitely other movies I’ve seen more often (The Evil Dead, and The Crow being tops in my rewatch list), but I’ve seen Demons enough to know the music cues and sparse dialogue by heart. As many times as I’ve seen it, it never gets old.
The movie is about a group of people who get magically trapped inside a movie theater while watching a film about people getting infected with some sort of demonic curse that causes them to attack and infect everyone around them. With life imitating art, the people in the theater also get infected and attack each other, turning more and more of the theater-goers into grotesque monsters. It’s essentially The Evil Dead, only it’s in a movie theater rather than a cabin in the woods. Plus, with more characters than Sam Raimi’s masterpiece, the blood and gore flow more freely and frequently. Well, I suppose that’s an arguable point, but regardless, Demons is really, really bloody.
Another reason I wanted to watch Demons is because I’ve been thinking about covering some Italian horror movies for my podcast/web site The Last Theater. I’ve been trying to decide which movies I want to start with, and I’ve been circling around Demons and some other films that have strong connections to it. For one thing, the director, Lamberto Bava, is the son of great Italian director Mario Bava. Lamberto Bava worked as an assistant director on some of his father’s films, and he worked in the same role on a couple movies I’ve wanted to cover for a long time: Cannibal Holocaust and Tenebrae.
Also, there’s another great director I’ve been wanting to talk about on The Last Theater, and he’s actually an actor in Demons. Michele Soavi directed a trio of fantastic movies between 1987 and 1994, and I’ve been thinking of doing some sort of director’s spotlight on him. In Demons, Soavi plays a mysterious man wearing what looks like a chrome Phantom of the Opera mask. I actually just learned that recently, so I wanted to watch the movie again knowing that Soavi is in it.
There’s so much to love about Demons, and I love that I’m still learning more about after so many years of watching and rewatching it. I love it, and it was a great way to start the month.