Pretty late in the giallo game here. There are a couple of decent murder scenes, mostly with stabbings but one in a toilet involving a hand being lopped off really stands out. Joanna Pacula, who went on to be in a few big Hollywood films, stars and does an o.k. job but overall besides the few bloody bits this one is pretty dull. It's also not much of a mystery since we see the killer right from the beginning. There are a few twists to at least make it mildly interesting but definitely not essential viewing for anyone.
I kept waiting for THE TOXIC AVENGER to show up since his musical cue happened so often in this!:
Like many sequels this one, by the same director(Lamberto Bava), is just a crappier version of the first movie. It replaces the cool theatrical setting with an apartment building that our demons get to run amuck in. Asia Argento makes her film debut at 11 years old, a monster from GHOULIES shows up at one point for no reason and not much of what happens makes a whole lot of sense. It's still the best of the DEMONS sequels and that's mostly due to the great Bobby Rhodes returning, except instead of playing a pimp this time he's a personal trainer which is not quite as cool. The blood and gore is present but not in as copious amounts as DEMONS. If you're really into the original though I'm sure you've at least seen this one and it's a good place to stop with the sequels.
OK, so this Italian giallo, which actually plays more like an 80s American slasher movie for a lot of it's runtime, might have one of the stupidest scenes I've seen in a long time. A lady is being threatened by our midnight slasher with a large knife and she fights him off with an electric egg beater. Now I will grant the movie that they look like they had some sharp attachments on the end of them but they were still basically just a couple of rotating whisks. To put an appropriately dumb exclamation point on this scene after she inevitably pulls the cord out of the wall she just gives up and turns her back to this knife-wielding maniac I guess in hopes that he will magically change his bloodthirsty mind. Not director Lamberto Bava's best work but if you just want to see something very simple and bloody that gets a bit repetitive before it's all over and throws in an absurd ending then give it a look if you can find it. AKA YOU'LL DIE AT MIDNIGHT and MIDNIGHT KILLER
I guess this movie has at least one fan since someone went through the trouble of making a music video for it:
I hate to spoil the endings of movies but it's hard to write about this film without saying my favorite thing about it is that a creepy obscene-phone-caller in a wheelchair turns out to be the hero. I don't know if that's ever happened before in all of cinematic history. If it did it was probably in one of those Japanese pinkie-violence films.
Lamberto Bava may not be quite the director that his father Mario was but I find most of the stuff that I've seen of his is pretty entertaining on a slightly lower-tier of Eurotrash excellence. In this he has the good sense to fill the movie, right from the start, with tons of boobs, mostly from very busty star Serena Grandi but also from almost every other gal who shows up thanks to a nudie-magazine office being a main ingredient in the story. Daria 'DEEP RED' Nicolodi is spared this nudity clause but does a good job of being a potential murderer by acting a little bit creepy throughout her performance. George 'ANTHROPOHAGUS' Eastman shows up just to get naked and sexy and the killer sees people with giant eyeball faces which always reminds me of that band The Residents. While this is clearly no Argento-like classic and it does drag in spots the giallo aspects are OK and things are shot really beautifully so at least you always have something nice to look at. Another neat thing is the rocking 80's soundtrack during some action sequences which might give you a chuckle or two.
AKA PHOTO OF GIOIA, PHOTOS OF JOY and GIOIA'S PHOTOGRAPH
While it's not really fair to compare director Lamberto Bava's giallos to the masterpieces of his father I think he made a few pretty decent little entertaining murder mystery films in his own right. This one concerns a film composer who gets caught up in a murder mystery while working on a horror film. There's a film within the film(featuring big-headed Bob, the little boy from HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY) which gives you clues to the story and a few twists along the way. The cast is pretty small so figuring out exactly who the killer is might not be impossible but they at least make it a bit of a challenge. Slashingly bloody death scenes and some creepy vibes makes this one a solid watch.
This was originally supposed to be a made-for-TV deal but Bava went a little overboard in the violence department(which I think is a big plus!) so it got a theatrical run in Italy.
I've seen a few people refer to this as Lamberto Bava's remake of his father's BLACK SUNDAY(a.k.a. THE MASK OF SATAN) but after watching it I think it's definitely more in the crappy rip-off department. The only thing that it takes from Mario Bava's film is the whole mask with the spikes in it thing and a witch who comes back and gets revenge. It also goes under the alternate title BLACK SUNDAY which is pretty ballsy for such a shitty imitation. The majority of the plot varies greatly from the original SUNDAY film though and is unfortunately way less stylish and iconic. Also we have no one here that is anywhere near the great Barbara Steele so they let a guy be the lead and he seems like an extremely dumb fellow throughout.
The movie starts of with a bunch of nitwit skiers who end up trapped in an ice-cave where they unleash some evil forces. Pretty quickly things stop making sense until we devolve into one of those- "was it a dream or did it really happen"-types of stories, and I hate those! Needless to say this was not a fun watch. Perhaps the fact that it was originally made for Spanish TV may have been a big reason. For a TV movie though it does feature a bit of nudity and gore which I doubt you would see in anything made for TV here in America.
This one is also alternately known as DEMONS 5:THE DEVIL'S VEIL which kind of makes sense since our group do sorta resemble the monsters from DEMONS and all the DEMONS sequels I've seen(besides part 2) are terrible!
