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DIRECTED BY: Lucio Fulci
FEATURING: Meg Register, Brett Halsey, Lucio Fulci, Lino Salemme
PLOT: An archeological dig unleashes vengeful ghosts. 
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: It’s a matter of balance with Fulci: do the weird parts outweigh the boring parts? Consider Un Chien Andalou. That movie has a razor blade slicing an eyeball. Fulci (famous eye assassin, apparently settling a score from childhood where optometrists beat him and took his lunch money) has a cat jump up onto a woman’s face and chomp her eyeball out and eat it, amid a screaming swarm of clawing kitties. This, in a film that would play well next to a Rollinade, complete with otherworldly dream logic and characters that act like anything but normal human beings with brains. Fulci is oft-capsuled in our pages, but never listed. One Fulci madhouse or another should ultimately claim the throne of weirdest, and we just as well might pick this one, if not The Beyond.
COMMENTS: Demonia is chock full of images you don’t see everyday. Fulci outdoes himself in his notoriously over-the-top death scenes. One notable flashback has a nun collect a fresh-born baby swaddled in blankets and then unceremoniously toss it into a flaming altar to burn. In a super-imposed effects shot, we see the baby’s arm amid crackling flames sticking out of the blankets as it uncurls its fist into a very distinct middle finger salute. So, there’s no shortage of off-the-wall death scenes. You could also pick the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene where a naked cultist nun ghost materializes brandishing a ghost-harpoon-gun, only to fire a very physical harpoon into some guy’s gut and quickly vanish.
The trouble with this title is the parts between the deaths: talky, boring, slow-paced, sloppily written. Fulci released Cat in the Brain, a parody with the director playing himself as a director who gets Hollywood hallucination fits after his sanity is taxed by directing endless gore scenes (a plot ripped off in Evil Ed) in the same year. Just sayin’. Fulci wasn’t exactly swinging for the pro leagues in 1990. In Demonia, Fulci is so low-effort between gore scenes that he might as well carry around a margarita to sip as he plays a police inspector who fruitlessly tries to solve these ghost murders.
What holds this movie back and divides Fulci fans? The acting is atrocious all around, the characters make no sense and are all dumb as cheese, the dialog is flat, the plot might as well be steered by dartboard, the low budget production makes everything look cheap and dirty, and Fulci phones in a performance of himself phoning it in. The first half hour’s slow pace almost kills it, but this is largely just set-up for characters that will later die to the ghost-nun rampage like so many roaches writhing in bug spray fumes. The second two-thirds grinds to the film’s advantage as the craziness starts to pile up. How many ways can we kill a person? How about tie this guy’s legs to two different trees so when you trigger the trap, they split him in two? The non-murder parts also have quirky details worth mentioning, such as the mark of the Satanic nuns, a question mark on the forehead. What, does the Riddler run this cult? We even have obligatory trippy dream sequences, with Fulci milking his Sicilian locations for all they’re worth. Moreover, the complete lack of regard for character motivation and logic lends this story a surreal quality of its own. Of course the two drunks who stumble into the church ruins end up lost in the dark until they fall onto pits of steel spikes—even though nobody else dies this way—because these ghost-nuns set more traps than the Saw franchise. I don’t even know how to describe how the town butcher dies, but it seems to be a case of his own sides of beef, possessed by ghost-witch-nuns, pummeling him to death in the meat locker.
Demonia opens with a flashback of the town storming the convent centuries ago and killing the witch-nuns by crucifying, then burning them, sealing the evidence behind a false wall. In the present, an archaeology student Liza (Meg Register) attends a dig for ancient Greek ruins on the shore of Santa Rosalia, Sicily, which is also the site of an ancient horseshoe amphitheater and the ruins of a church. Liza is feverishly obsessed with the legends of crucified nuns at the convent, but the dig is led by Professor Paul Evans (Brett Halsey), who insists that we’re here to dig for Greek ruins and nothing else, dammit. The professor treats Liza like a controlling father treats a rebellious daughter, arguing repeatedly about her going off to check out the nun legends. Liza continues striking out on her own, however, eventually uncovering the crucified nuns’ sealed tomb; but by then, they’ve disturbed enough ghosts to start triggering mysterious deaths. All Hell, plus several suburbs located around Hell, breaks loose. Liza pursues town records at the local dusty-tomes repository when an exposition fairy (a fortune teller?) interrupts her study to cryptically invite her to a reading where she fills the student in on the rest of the witch-nuns legend (that’s where we get the flashback of the burning baby and a lot more wicked nunnery, besides.) Immediately afterwards, fortune-teller lady gets dispatched by her own cats. The random deaths draw the attention of Interpol Inspector Carter (Fulci), who is surprisingly laid-back about the whole thing. Finally, the ghost nuns tire of toying with these idiots and start killing everyone off, until the townspeople form a literal torch mob to drive off the archaeologists and burn down the witch-nuns’ tomb once and for all, which leads to even more deaths. Eat your popcorn and don’t ask questions. Moral of the story: do NOT mess with ghost nuns!
Demonia stacks up in the same league as 1993’s sister scary-nun movie Dark Waters, except that Waters is heavy on atmosphere but light on gore, while Franco could care beans about ambiance. Demonia tells a far madder tale, with an off-the-chain abandon that will keep you guessing. The one thing you know at each turn of this story is that it’s going to be relentlessly dumb; it’s just a matter of seeing whose dumb wins out. None of our main characters are given any backstory or character development—the Professor is an especially frustrating one-dimensional brick of a character—and though most of them come to bad ends, you don’t feel much for them. Meg Register, who plays Liza like the platinum-haired counterfeit Hitchcock girl she is, never really gets a moment to shine.
I was 50/50 on an Apocrypha recommendation until I saw a movie poster with one of the question-mark nuns in her whiteface Kabuki make-up looking less scary and more Muppet. For a movie where not a single damn thing from start to finish is explained at all, the pale shocked face with the stunned expression and question mark on the forehead depicts exactly how this movie leaves the viewer. Demonia, as random as it seems, just strikes a groove that’s hard to describe—maybe giallo punk? It’s kinda charming when you look at it that way. I came to an epiphany: Fulci was ribbing us the whole time. Demonia is the true self-parody, not Cat in the Brain. He can afford to be sloppy, because he knows he’s just good at making feral fiction.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: