Until now I had never seen DEMONS 2, really didn’t know anything about it, and considering its provenance it could’ve been a sequel-in-name-only. So I was excited when the opening narration described the events of the first film: demons unleashed from a movie theater. But it says that was followed by “days of terror that convinced the world demons can exist.” Days. So the war between the survivors and the monsters implied by the ending has already wrapped up, I guess. Things seem to be back to normal.

You could say it’s a DAWN OF THE DEAD type sequel – new set of characters later in the same apocalypse – but really it’s more of a do-over, a different take on the same rough idea. I think that’s a pretty cool approach, and they chose good elements to remix. Instead of a movie theater, the specific structure it focuses on is a high-rise apartment building called The Tower. Instead of the meta element of a movie about demons showing in the theater, they have one broadcast on TV, and various people in the building are watching it. They also have another part where suddenly it cuts to some punks driving around, although in my opinion they don’t really do much of interest with it. On the other hand they do one-up the iconic people-with-glowing eyes scene by doing it with a bigger mob of demons and then again looking up a staircase as they run down it.

Lamberto Bava returns as director. Dario Argento returns as producer and co-writer. He has a different daughter in the cast – Asia Argento, then ten years old, in her first movie. This time the score is courtesy of Simon Boswell – his second after PHENOMENA – and the needledrops include songs by The Smiths, The Cult, The Art of Noise, Peter Murphy, Dead Can Dance and Love and Rockets.

This came only a year later (1986), but it feels deeper into the ‘80s with its more yuppified male lead George (David Knight, WHO SHOT PAT?), who lives with his pregnant wife Hannah (Nancy Brilli, Ruggero Deodato’s BODY COUNT) in an apartment with fluorescent light art on the walls. Who does he think he is? Selina Kyle?

Another aspect that’s very emblematic of the decade is when it dips into the fitness craze of the era. It does this in a much less sarcastic/satirical way than THE TOXIC AVENGER (1984), KILLER WORKOUT (1987) or DEATH SPA (1988). Bobby Rhodes played Tony the Pimp in part 1, here he plays Hank, a trainer at the building gym, yelling tough love encouragement to various oiled up musclemen and women in colorful leotards and leg warmers.

But the main focus is the birthday party of Sally from apartment 206 (which is much higher up than the second floor). She seems like an adult but might be meant to be a teen, because one scene reveals her parents are out to dinner so she can party without them. She’s self conscious about how she looks in her dress, but her hipster friends get her to dance and have fun… until she finds out some nerd accidentally invited a boy she doesn’t like to the party, then she throws a fit and hides in her room watching the demon movie.

I think the first 20 minutes lean a little too heavy on the movie-within-the-movie, which is about some people sneaking over a wall into a “forbidden zone” to take photos, finding a demon corpse, accidentally bleeding on it, and you know the deal. It seems like a sequel to the untitled movie-within-the-movie in DEMONS but also to the results of that movie (unleashing demons), because it keeps saying stuff like, “Can it happen again? Will we be ready next time? What is being done to prevent it?” Maybe it’s a shitty horror movie but they added narration to sell it as an important torn-from-the-headlines docudrama.

I think generally you want a fake movie to be very heightened to stand out from the “reality” of the actual movie you’re watching, but it’s actually the reverse here. Maybe that’s my own hang up. I do still enjoy how events on TV mirror events at the party. Fortunately the sequel kicks into gear when the demon is resurrected in the TV movie, because then he seems to notice Sally watching, and walk right up to the screen, making eye contact. (Happy birthday!) There’s an incredible VIDEODROME-inspired effect (footage projected onto a latex sheet as a guy stretches through it, I believe) where he pokes his head out of the TV screen. Obviously the image of the movie. I love how bizarrely it warps his face.

Next thing you know Sally’s growing claws while blowing out her candles, and there’s a nice repeat of the part 1 detail of watching one of her front teeth slowly pop out and drop as a demon fang sprouts beneath it. Once again, the genius Sergio Stivaletti is knocking it out of the park here on the paint and the latex. We get makeup, we get puppets, we get animatronics, we get the world.

At the same time, the look of the movie becomes much more stylized, we have backlit fog in the apartment, and also she seems more confident. Probly knows now that her dress does look good on her.

There’s a great joke where Hannah tries to come late to the party for some cake, and this is what’s going on inside when she’s at the door:

No answer though, so she goes away. So for now on, if you ever knock on anyone’s door and they don’t answer, assume that’s what it looks like on the other side.

The fact is, this is quantifiably a good movie, due to the volume of amazing shit it includes. For example, blood (or bile according to Wikipedia, but I thought it was blood) just starts pouring off of Sally’s head, sizzling on the ground, burning through multiple floors like the acid blood in ALIEN, infecting more people, and causing a fire that knocks the power out, trapping George and a flirtatious callgirl (Virginia Bryant, THE BARBARIANS) in the elevator. On one of the floors below there’s a lady (Anita Bartolucci, IDENTIKIT) who lives alone with her dog Davy, and the dog notices the blood hole and calls her attention to it by growling at it. But she realizes he must’ve licked some of it up because all the sudden he starts to… well, it’s hard to explain but his gums extend so far out of his mouth that they have their own set of glowing green eyes.

I love that they brought back Bobby Rhodes to play a different character. I said in the part 1 review that I guess it makes sense for a pimp to be the guy who takes charge and bosses people around. It makes even more sense for a gym instructor, and this guy Hank does a much better job than Tony, turning all the gym rats into an instant army. The demons come in right at closing time, they start crushing musclemen in the equipment, and without a moment of hesitation our boys are tossing dumbbells at them. I guess everybody knows about the movie theater incident, they don’t waste time being surprised by the existence of demons, they get right to it.

Hank leads everybody down to the parking garage, but the doors won’t open. Nevertheless, these people mean more business than has ever been meant before. They’re all running around trying what they can to get out: hitting the gates with poles, ramming them with cars, finding guns, axes, fire extinguishers and shit, waging war. They’re rolling cars together, making gas bombs, leaping onto the cars. Their subplot is pretty much a zombie siege movie, but a particularly chaotic and energetic one with lots of fire and car stunts. It’s too bad most of them turn into demons, because otherwise they’d probly appreciate what a good workout they got.

Meanwhile there’s a little kid named Tommy (Marco Vivio, Italian dubbing voice for Spider-Man in the first two Raimi movies) who’s alone by himself. He is a He-Man fan (owns Snake Mountain and Fisto). He hears demons growling so he sits on his bunk bed wielding a toy laser gun for protection and a stuffed Sylvester the Cat for comfort. (It’s funny that when you’re that age you can think of Sylvester as your lovable pal. You don’t pick up on what an absolute prick he is in the cartoons.)

If this wasn’t pre-DIE HARD I would assume it was inspired by DIE HARD that there’s some badass climbing in the elevator shaft and rappelling down from the roof. Also we get a good shot of a mannequin falling off.

As soon as I saw Hannah’s pregnant belly I thought “Oh no, these Italians are about to cross some lines.” And yes, of course, she goes into labor during all this. But it’s not as vicious as I expected. She gets a special preview of the challenges of motherhood when she’s attacked by demonic Tommy (Davide Marotta, “Baby,” THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST). Then his true demon self tears out of his belly and he’s a little ghoulie/boglin motherfucker. Look at this guy!

I’m not made of stone, obviously that jolly little dude gave me a big smile at first. But once he sticks around for a few scenes I started to think okay, fella, this is a DEMONS movie, not GHOST CHASE. Go away. So I enjoyed his savage death involving the end of an umbrella impaling his head from the back, poking out of his mouth, going through the wall and pushing his head through the hole with it. (Sorry, neighbors.) Unfortunately George doesn’t open the umbrella – you’ll have to watch Keenan Thompson’s cameo on Chucky to see something like that.

Of course there’s still gonna be a birth scene, so (SPOILER) the couple ends up taking shelter (Mary and Jesus like) in a now-abandoned TV studio. Surprisingly the baby is born non-demonic, but the great gimmick is that after demon Sally stumbles in and dies, a camera happens to be capturing her corpse, which causes an alive version of her to appear on a wall of TV screens, and George has to smash those before she escapes into reality like the first demon did.

One of the things that made the first DEMONS so cool was that ending where it seemed like the whole world was now battling demons, but I guess since they kinda undid that in this sequel they knew we weren’t gonna fall for that again. So it’s a more hopeful ending. The city seems empty, and it does freeze on them with looks of uncertainty on their faces, but first they smile and kiss. They don’t try to repeat the spectacular mid-credits shocker.

DEMONS 2 is definitely a fun and worthy sequel. My initial thought was that the first one is quite a bit better, but the more I rewatched parts of this and wrote about it the more it started to narrow that gap. At any rate this is another fun ‘80s mix tape of slimy, monstery fun, as well as a monument to the monoculture. It takes us back to the days when there were only a few channels, so we had shared cultural moments like that one night when we all watched that demon movie and for some of us the demon came out of the screen and fucked up our entire building. These young kids will never understand what it was like.