Demonoid (1980)

The first and last time I got stitches was before I hit double digits.  I was bitten by a dog (which wouldn’t be the last time), and had to get four sutures in my right bicep (when you’re that age, it’s not a lot, but it sure as hell feels like it).  Since then, I’ve had injuries to my hands that I probably should have had stitched and didn’t, because that first time was more than enough for me.  While working at a fast food restaurant in my teens, I was hauling a box of shortening up from the basement, and my hand got caught on the hook end of an electrical junction box cover.  While working on a dryer, I split a knuckle open.  While removing a water valve from a washer, I gouged another knuckle on the same hand.  To this day, I maintain that the actual bone was bifurcated, but since no doctor was consulted, I guess we’ll never know.  Needless to say, I’m sure these injuries will come back to haunt me in short order, as I can already feel how arthritis is and will set in on my joints (not good for someone who works with their hands).  If you’ve ever stared at your hands for any length of time (like Felix Unger did in the “Odd Monks” episode of The Odd Couple), you really do discover what a marvel these appendages are.  They are one of the hardest parts of the human body to draw, too.  The things we can do with them are amazing, and, more often than not, we truly do take them for granted (until, of course, we are without their use, partially or in total).  I wonder, then, why, for as “important” a purpose as he has and as much work as he has to accomplish in a given day, Satan would cut off his left hand and send it to Guanajuato, Mexico, as he does in Alfredo Zacarias’ Demonoid (aka La Mano Del Diablo aka Macabra aka Demonoid: Messenger of Death)?  You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone. 

Visiting her husband Mark (Roy Cameron Jenson) at their Mexican mine, Jennifer Baines (Samantha Eggar) uncovers a chamber previously used for Satanic rites.  She and her husband remove a tiny “coffin” shaped like a human hand from which escapes the titular Demonoid (no one calls it that in the film; it just sounds neat).  The avaricious anatomical appurtenance proceeds to wend its way through a series of victims, all the while setting its sights on the woman who freed it (this becomes a rather perplexing point, as the entire film could have been about thirty minutes long, realistically).

Aside from telepathic/telekinetic heads/brains-in-tanks, the most filmed disembodied human limb has to be the hand (I know of no film where an evil foot attacks people, and even the penis got its own cinematic sojourn in Doris Wishman’s The Amazing Transplant).  Whether they are grafted onto some hapless sap or scuttling about under their own steam, hands just have a greater visual appeal than any other body part.  Plus, they’re really good for strangling (and crushing skulls from the evidence presented here; I had to resist saying “on hand”).  What the idea of a lone hand causing malfeasance does is brings up a discussion about accountability.  If the hand is attached to a person who then turns to evil (Mad Love, Hands of the Ripper, The Hands of Orlac, etcetera), we, as an audience, have to consider whether the flagitiousness is located in the hand or in the person it wields.  If it’s all in the hand, then the person abrogates their role in any villainy.  They are no more than another victim or a fall guy.  This additionally raises the question of where consciousness resides; in the mind, in the spirit, or in every part of the body (the last two being easily tied together)?  Like the alien in John Carpenter’s The Thing, maybe every microbe has an instinct for survival.  This is fine for straight forward horror/monster movies.  You have the good guys, you have the bad creature.  You don’t need any more.  

However, if we deem that the evil is inside the person and not the part, we have more possibilities to work with, a more nuanced premise.  Now, it’s the person struggling with the evil within them, the transplanted appendage being just an excuse for them to exercise their darkest desires.  We can even postulate that, even if the hand or whatever is, indeed, evil, its influence brings out the worst in its host rather than working strictly toward its own purposes.  In this sense, the chicken and the egg come into existence at the same time.  In Demonoid, we can say that Mark always wanted to blow up his mine with all his workers in it.  We can say that he always wanted to run away from his wife and head out to Vegas.  We can say that Father Cunningham (Stuart Whitman) always wanted to attack a woman.  They simply never had the stones/opportunity to do it.  Even when the Demonoid does things after its host has apparently died or is moribund, we can still say that the person’s psychosis is so deep-seated that they do these things subconsciously in order to keep their mental narrative going.  Bear in mind, I am in no way saying that the hand in this film isn’t its own thing.  We see it do plenty while unattached to anyone, and it clearly has an agenda (though said agenda is unclear; does it want to rule the world?  To just get joined up with Jennifer?  To play Craps until it runs out of money and credit?).  But we can still consider its host’s responsibility in the proceedings, the same as if they were being controlled by the “injecto-pods” in Zontar: The Thing from Venus or somesuch.  Just something to think about, I suppose.

What I find special about this film is not that it’s especially well-written or well-shot or well-acted (though all three jobs are performed competently enough).  Rather, Demonoid is mindful of its mindlessness.  It knows that the premise is silly, but it plays it straight.  It disregards the common theme in films like this of a crisis of faith (sure, Father Cunningham has a few scenes regarding this dilemma, but they never develop into anything all that important, and the idea of the power of God defeating in the power of Satan never plays out except on a surface level).  The filmmakers understand that all they have to do is say that this is Satan’s hand without any other background information and let it ride.  There is a gleefully grimy aura on the film.  It is utterly unafraid to go for the gore, and said gore is usually accompanied by/women with copious amounts of cleavage.  The big “shock” ending is as predictable as that of an EC Comic.  The film stands there in front of the viewer, warts and all (but especially warts), and it couldn’t care less if you believe in it.  It believes in itself.

MVT:  The serious/not serious attitude allows the film to keep going and drag you along with it.

Make or Break:  The vague prologue that kind of sets up the story but is really just a small showcase for some tits and blood.

Score:  7/10      

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987)

I didn’t go to my senior prom (boo hoo!), but this doesn’t sadden me in the least.  I had no girlfriend at the time, and I was petrified to ask anyone who I thought could possibly have been available to go with me.  I was also fiercely against things like proms and sports and so forth (perhaps because I never participated in them, perhaps because I genuinely just didn’t give a shit about them and still don’t; so punk rock).  I didn’t relish the idea of renting a tux, a limo (or just a nice car; I drove a 1964 Oldsmobile way back then [The Lima Bean Green Machine, it was dubbed]), buying a corsage, etcetera.  It seemed like a whole lot of bother for an evening I likely wouldn’t have enjoyed, especially since there weren’t many people at my school with whom I hung out on the regular who were going.  I did go to a semi-formal early on in my high school days, and the evening was, to put it lightly, a letdown (maybe this soured me; after all, if one time sucked, every time had to suck, right?).  Having seen my share of horror films, proms and their ilk appeared like Hell on Earth, and people always got massacred at them, and movies never lie.  Decades down the road, Bruce Pittman’s Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II arrived to confirm everything I believed in my teens.  I stand justified (or maybe just rationalized).

The year is 1957, and Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) wreaks havoc on her prom and jilts her boyfriend Billy Nordham (Steve Atkinson) for bad boy Buddy Cooper (Robert Lewis).  Billy comes upon an abandoned stink bomb as the perfect revenge, but the fuse lights Mary Lou’s dress on fire as she accepts her prom queen coronation, killing her (we’re left to guess what the combination of burnt flesh and hair, chiffon, and stink bomb smell like).  Jump forward to 1987, where young Vicki (Wendy Lyon) struggles with her virginity, her ice queen mother, and her forbidden love for Craig Nordham (Louis Ferreira), Principal Billy’s (now played by Michael Ironside) son.  It doesn’t take long for Mary Lou to exact her revenge and lay claim her crown with Vicki as her weapon of choice.

The thing which struck me the most about this film was its refreshingly unglamorous view of the Fifties in America (or Canada where this was filmed, but po-tay-to, po-tah-to).  Usually, this era is glorified for being lily-pure and straitlaced and oh-so-perfect.  Sex and murder and rape and all of the evils of the world didn’t exist back then, if popular media is to be believed, and if these things were portrayed (post-Hayes Code), they were sanitized to the point of blandness, more often than not (perhaps the more egregious crime than denying them outright).  Of course, we know that this isn’t the case; Let’s assume we’re not all that naïve.  But it was a simpler time for many (maybe this is due to putting on the proverbial blinders), and it’s exalted for this (I certainly don’t deny having a fondness for it, myself).  Personally, I like the restrictions that were placed on filmmakers back then to a degree, because if they really, truly wanted to portray darker themes or more salacious elements, they had to get creative in order to do it.  This, for me, adds some depth to many of these films, the fact that they didn’t just wiggle all their naughty bits in your face (just look at Nightmare Alley for proof).  Prom Night 2 states that people were just as awful back then as they were in the Eighties (and now, naturally).  

Mary Lou LOVES sex, and she’s a self-centered asshole every inch of the way (she taunts a priest in a confessional before hitting the prom just to tell him how much she enjoys herself).  She dumps Billy unceremoniously in the middle of the soiree just to get her hump on with Buddy, grabbing his crotch and positively salivating at the prospect of what’s awaiting her within his pants.  Buddy’s also a dick, razzing Billy in a finders-keepers, go fuck yourself sort of way.  Billy is no slouch, either.  We can understand wanting to get back at Mary Lou for his heartbreak, but he takes it too far from his idea’s impetus.  Plus, he’s never punished for what he did (that the audience is made aware of).  In fact, he’s rewarded (like Dorothy dropping her house on the Wicked Witch of the East), being given a position of power in the community.  

Little has changed in the intervening years.  While Billy has put the past incident behind him, Buddy has spent his days trying to make up for it (he feels guilty for not trying to rescue his burning paramour), becoming a priest and swearing off the sins of the flesh.  In high school, however, the kids are still jerks, beset with problems that make their lives a living hell.  Vicki’s mother forces her family to pray all the time (instead of having a doctor look at Vicki after a volleyball “mishap,” mom insists that Vicki simply “needs to spend some time with the Lord”), shades of Piper Laurie in Carrie, in case the similarities weren’t obvious enough.  Craig spends his time trying to be accepted by Vicki’s mother (her dad likes him, though), but he’ll forever be an undesirable to her.  Vicki herself is virginal, but she’s investigating her sexuality (the first shot we get of her is Vicki checking her body out in her mirror) in the face of her escalating puberty and rampaging hormones.  Her room looks like a ten-year old’s, including a rocking horse (which plays a rather creepy role a little later on).  Vicki is friends with Monica (Beverley Hendry), who wants a date to the prom but tells guys who want to talk to her to fuck off.  Jess (Beth Gondek) is a quasi-outcast among this group, looking like a distaff Robert Smith in MC Hammer’s wardrobe.  She’s also pregnant from some jerk who ditched her and is positively miserable about her situation.  Josh (Brock Simpson) is the real humdinger.  He’s supposed to be cool and smart (he’s anything but), and even after he gets a date with Monica he still has time to ask for a blowjob from Kelly (Terri Hawkes), the school’s current queen bitch, in return for rigging the prom’s election.  What this all amounts to is a reflection on the fact that being a teenager is nothing but gloom and doom, no matter which generation you came from or your supposed place in the pecking order.  Not many horror films of this era espoused this viewpoint, but it’s nice that this one did.

MVT:  The film’s misanthropy is prominently showcased from first frame to last.

Make or Break:  The opening prom sequence gives us everything we need to get the idea of how we’re supposed to take this film and its characters.  Plus, it mirrors the finale, so if you don’t want to make it that far, at least you kind of know what you’re missing.

Score:  6.75/10     

The Sect (1991)

There’s something innately creepy about hippies, at least on film.  I don’t say this out of any hatred for them; it’s more an observation of their portrayals in cinema.  Even when all hippies do is cavort, and get their boobs painted, and smoke weed, there is a quasi-unsettling aspect to them.  I think this is because they are outside the mainstream life experience (for example, I never lived in a hippie commune, so the experience is foreign to me, though I understand the reasoning behind it).  Even though they are just people, they are still “other.”  They have no rules governing their lives, no restraints placed on them by society, but they espouse their beliefs with a casual zealotry also found in hardcore religious fanatics (though religious fanatics are hardly casual about anything).  Perhaps more than this is the thought that their utopian ideals are rather naïve and doomed to failure by dint of their being commonly unshared with the vast majority of the world.  Naturally, Charles Manson and his Family are held up as the exemplar of how hippie communities and religious cults can be distressingly similar.  They also played a large part in why the hippie lifestyle fell out of popularity as the Sixties drew to a close, I think.  The “experiment” (for want of a better term) was a failure, because the violence and darkness of the real world hippies seemed to want to escape from was inescapable.  

The only way for their culture to succeed would be if every single person on Earth thought exactly the same way (an idea that carries its own share of frightening implications).  But since their ideology is rooted in pure freedom, this means that not only does it allow for people with nebulous intent to take advantage of the situation, but also that the sense of anarchy engendered by their lack of rules makes for a certain vulnerability.  Their passivity leaves them open to attack.  In cinema, conversely, hippie communes are just one short step away from being radical cultists (in fact, they are often referred to as “hippie cults,” and their “gurus” or leaders or whatever often occupy the role of spiritual heads), and very little is scarier than a gang of steadfast ideologues with no societal boundaries coming at you (see the world of American political discourse for further research).  The hippies in the superfluous prologue of Michele Soavi’s The Sect (aka Demons IV aka La Setta aka The Devil’s Daughter) are not only of the victim variety, but they are also past their sell by date (1971 is the year given onscreen, and yes, there were hippies around after 1969, but after that year [being both the apex and the nadir of the movement] the herd was thinning out).

Robed Christ figure Damon (Thomas Arana) shows up at a hippie camping trip, rattles off some “deep” lyrics from The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil (just in case there was the slightest danger of the film being subtle), and, with the help of his Satanic biker gang, carves up the young people for some ceremony which apparently just doesn’t come off as planned.  Leap forward twenty years to Frankfurt, Germany, where young Miriam (Kelly Curtis) almost nails hobo-esque (he wears a ratty cloak and sports fingerless knit gloves) Moebius (Herbert Lom) with her car, takes him to her house, and basically allows him to set into motion a chain of events that may bring about the Apocalypse with her as its nexus.

Just to get this out in the open, Soavi’s film (co-written with Gianni Romoli and Dario Argento) is essentially a bald-faced riff on both Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen films.  Even before the plot gets going, this is blindingly obvious.  With that said, the film is also loaded (and I mean loaded) with symbolism.  Clocks and time play huge parts.  The hippies in the film’s opening destroy a clock with their slingshots, trying to stop time (they are, after all, two years beyond the end of their movement).  People constantly state that “it’s time” or that they have to bide their time and wait.  There is a miniature paper house in Miriam’s home with a large clock drawn on one side.  Moebius turns his clock ahead before he sets off to “meet” Miriam (perhaps to move up his time table, perhaps because the clock was off and he is obsessed with accuracy, perhaps neither).  Moebius checks his pocket watch while talking to Miriam, always conscious of the schedule he’s on.  There is a sense that all of these machinations are planned out to the minute, because there is a confluence of events that must take place in order for it all to coalesce (the only indication we get that events have to occur at a certain time is a shot of an eclipse, though this is never addressed as anything other than a visual instance of a “cosmic” occurrence with no exposition or foreshadowing to presage it), but they are put into motion with somewhat less than military precision.  The clock and time are the fatalism of the characters’ ever approaching destiny.

There are also heavy fertility symbols throughout the film.  There is a well (maybe a sewer?) in Miriam’s sub-basement, and she will be submerged in it at a crucial moment.  It’s also a focal point for all of the characters which is returned to constantly.  The water is also turned blue at one point, and this ties into the connection between Miriam and Christianity’s Virgin Mary (whose name in the Aramaic language is Mariam), who is always depicted in blue robes as a symbol of her purity (we also get a shot of a mural with the Virgin Mary on it early in the film, in what is essentially superfluous prologue, number two).  At one point, Miriam lounges in a bathtub full of this blue water and submerges her head, becoming reborn and ready for her upcoming role.  There is a supposedly extinct insect which we are informed symbolizes fertility.  This insect is adorned with a spiral on its back, and this is yet another birth/rebirth motif, although a slightly more esoteric one.  The spiral (which is seen not only on the insect but also in the sub-basement’s skylight and carved into stone in a garden) carries the dual symbology of Miriam’s life spiraling out of her control and the expansion of the circle of life outward from birth (maybe from hers, maybe from the universe’s, maybe both).  Finally, there is the very obvious fertility symbol of rabbits.  Miriam has a collection of rabbit tchotchkes and a live rabbit she calls “Rabbit” (like how Columbo’s dog was “Dog”).  More than this surface metaphor, Rabbit is the insidiousness of Miriam’s fertility, evil wearing a kind face (a little like Moebius).  Rabbit is no mere rabbit.  It watches television while Miriam sleeps (yes, really), changing the channel (but always coming back to a magician pulling one of his kind out of a hat).  Rabbit follows Miriam around, lurking near her at all times, a portent of what is coming.

Of course, this being an Italian horror film, it thrives on its bonkers qualities and specious logic, and they are, in fact, what winds up elevating this one from the pack.  Soavi also knows his way around a camera (as does cinematographer Raffaele Mertes), and The Sect is pleasantly stylish in its visual aspects.  The camera zooms around the pipes in Miriam’s house.  Many shots are gorgeously thoughtful in their compositions.  There are Dutch angles aplenty as well as some interesting uses of closeups, most particularly a nice zoom in to Miriam’s nostrils (you have to see it).  So, even if you don’t buy that a rabbit wants to stay up late channel surfing or that an ersatz Shroud of Turin can smother people (did I not mention that?), you’ll have more than enough here to take in on a pure eye candy level to keep you happy.

MVT:  The look of the film is striking and, though I hate to use this word, sumptuous at times.

Make or Break:  The scene where a character comes back to life and goes nuts (who was basically nuts before death too, so there’s that) is really one for the ages, in my opinion.

Score:  6.5/10