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BLACK DEMONS

I really have to start watching better movies.

Wait...

I really need to stop watching Umberto Lenzi movies.

That's better. I don't even know why I decided to watch BLACK DEMONS last night. I really don't. I've seen it once before and didn't like it. I didn't expect to like it the second time around. What I absolutely didn't expect, in ANY way, was to get through it in a single viewing. I feel I deserve a cookie for that.

BLACK DEMONS follows Kevin, his girlfriend Jessica and her half-brother Dick as they travel through Brazil. Dick is a bit of a weirdo recovering from a nervous breakdown. He's also got a hard-on for anything dealing with strange rites and rituals. Naturally, he want to check out some Macumba rituals and is granted his chance by a suspicious woman. At the ritual, he is given a necklace by an old seer. He passes out, his tape recorder still recording the ritual. The next morning, the three pack up their shit and take off to Rio only to have their jeep break down in the middle of the road. They get some help from Jose and Sonia, a couple of locals who let them stay at the place they're renting, the site of a slave rebellion half a decade or so ago. For some reason, Dick waits until dark and then sneaks out into a small cemetery by the house. He turns on the tape recorder and the sounds of the ritual chanting bring six pissed off dead slaves back to life. The usual kind of nonsense ensues...

This film is just terrible. I can't think of a single nice thing to say about it. Bad acting, bad dubbing, bad editing, bad effects, bad lighting... all of those things are expected in a Lenzi film and to complain about any of them is rather pointless. You don't put in an Umberto Lenzi film and expect greatness. You put it in, press play and hope to your god that the violence is plentiful. And therein lies the problem: BLACK DEMONS is completely anemic. When you think back over the career of Umberto Lenzi, you inevitably think of buckets of stage blood and animal entrails. He's one of the true gorehounds of Italian genre cinema and his films practically revel in sadism. So why the fuck is BLACK DEMONS so damned restrained?.

Now, I'm not a gorehound. I don't care if the violence in a movie is subdued, non-existent or extremely graphic. It doesn't matter to me. But here you have a splatter director making what is essentially a zombie film and there is literally only two liters of blood spilled in the whole affair! It's ridiculous. If there were a single sub-genre in existence that I preferred to be blood-soaked and gruesome, it's the zombie film sub-genre but Lenzi can't bring himself to toss in a single limb-chopping, throat tearing or mutilation. It's absurdly restrained. While I realize that BLACK DEMONS is not really a zombie film, it's close enough and a little bit of ultra-violence would have gone a long way here.

It's not as if there is anything else going on in the movie to hold the audience's attention. It's amazingly dull. I say "amazingly" because just when I thought it couldn't get any more dull, it somehow did. I was almost impressed with the level of disinterest I had in the film, no doubt due to the fact that our protagonists are about as interesting as cinder blocks. It takes a special kind of skill to make a movie this boring. This is the kind of film that makes me reconsider my list of Worst Film Directors of All-Time.

A total turd.