Demons 2 (1986)

Director: Lamberto Bava

Starring: David Edwin Knight, Nancy Brilli, Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni

A group of tenants and visitors are trapped in a 10-story high-rise apartment building infested with demons who proceed to hunt the dwindling humans down.

I hated ‘Demons’, and thought it was a really bad movie. What besieged me therefore to watch ‘Demons 2’ I’ll never know, but I’m glad I did. This was so much better.

In the first film, a group of people are trapped inside a movie theatre, pursued by demons. In the sequel, residents are trapped in a high rise building. Neither film seem to know the difference between demons and zombies. These ‘demons’ have all the traits of zombies, thus I view them more as zombie films as opposed to demons. When bitten or scratched by a demon, the victims become blood-thirsty creatures (and not possessed), hunting the living – much like zombies.

Just like the first movie, the characters do and say the strangest things. Fortunately here, the film vastly improves around the halfway mark. They’ve omitted the ever-present humor from the first film, substituting it with more suspense. (Some moments are still funny, but unintentionally and due to bad acting or weird situations.) The suspense is also elevated thanks to a young pregnant woman, Hannah. The worst character by far, was Sally – the annoying birthday girl with issues. My favorite characters were Hannah and her husband, George. (Who would have thought a rather nerdish George would turn out to be the film’s hunky hero – now that was a big surprise!)

Hannah and George only really surface as heroes at the halfway mark, which is around the same time the movie gets so much better. The film becomes a race for survival with more and more demons hunting people. It actually turns out amazing, with gunfire, crashes, cars ramming into others, demons jumping through the air, and fire! It became a non-stop thrill ride.

The props and effects are disgusting – and this is a compliment! I have to give it to them, it was incredibly well done. The zombie (erm, sorry, demon) make-up were not all that great, but the props more than compensated for that. This is still not a good film, but it is a very enjoyable bad film that actually delivers.

Would I watch it again? Surprisingly, yes.