This DVD I rented is labelled DEMONS III: THE OGRE, but I knew that wasn’t really a thing. That’s just how video labels chose to promote THE OGRE, a 1989 TV movie that Lamberto Bava went off to do after giving up on a third DEMONS.

THE OGRE opens in Portland, Oregon, where a little girl wakes up and wanders into a dungeon/wine cellar and finds a bizarre, pulsating cocoon on the ceiling. It’s like a giant spider egg sac except it glows yellow, drips fluid and beats like a heart. She sees a spindly monster inside, and it reaches a hand out for her, then chases her. Eventually she wakes up. Yes, it was only a dream, but she dropped her teddy bear in the dream, and now it’s gone.

Then the movie is about a family on vacation in Italy, and it took me a bit to realize the mother, Cheryl (Virginia Bryant, the call girl from DEMONS 2) is the little girl now grown up. She’s a horror novelist – apparently a successful one, since her family is able to rent an entire castle to stay in. It’s obvious from the way the locals react that this is an infamous castle people are scared of, but the family is clueless, so clearly they weren’t given an ogre discount or anything.

Soon after they get there, Cheryl starts having her reoccurring childhood nightmare again. It’s kind of clever – her younger self wakes up in bed with her husband Tom (Paolo Malco, THE NEW YORK RIPPER, THUNDER WARRIOR), gets up and wanders off again. When awake/grown she discovers that the dungeon/cellar from the dreams actually exists in this castle, and her teddy bear is there too! She tries to tell Tom, but of course he thinks she’s losing it. She also finds green slime, notices a large handprint in her flour, encounters a Crazy Ralph type doing a painting of the cocoon over the castle, and keeps hallucinating flashes of the ogre.

The main hook for the drama is that she believes in this supernatural thing and her husband doesn’t. She has correctly diagnosed that they’re in a CASTLE FREAK situation, but he thinks his wife is delusional. Maybe the most nuanced thing about it is that her childhood trauma seems to be somewhat mixed up with her sexuality, because she writes kind of sexy stuff in her book about the ogre touching her, which Tom belittles her for. I felt really bad for her. Also I felt bad for the other women in the area, because the ogre wanders out and assaults at least two of them.

The monster FX for the growing ogre are really cool, and there’s a great effect of a painting stretching like the TV screen did in DEMONS 2. The fully formed ogre is semi-cool but he wears a dorky medieval outfit. And unfortunately the story moves very slow, with lots of conversations between husband and wife and wife and a local she befriends (Sabrina Ferilli, THE GREAT BEAUTY) about a mystery whose solution we know from the beginning, which is fine, except for the fact that the solution is “there’s an ogre.”

The music is by DEMONS 2’s Simon Boswell (but no rock songs), it’s from the co-writer of the DEMONS movies, Dardano Sacchetti, and it does vaguely fit a DEMONS formula in that there’s a contained location (the castle) and a meta-horror element (Cheryl is working on a novel about the ogre called A Drawer Full of Teeth). But it doesn’t have the same energy as a DEMONS movie at all – it feels more like one of the dull movies-within-the-movie that would be in one.

On the positive side, there’s an INFERNO-inspired scene where she swims underwater and finds corpses, and at the end she gets to run over the ogre, then back over him, then run over him again, then back over him again. And it’s kind of satisfying that husband and wife see the monster corpse together and watch it fade from existence, now on the same page that this thing was real and is now gone. On the other hand, that husband is a fucker, she should’ve ditched his ass anyway, if not for his lack of support then for the part where he tries to bring her back to “reality” by suddenly slapping her hard in the face. (At least she slaps him back.)

THE OGRE was part of a series of four TV movies that also included GRAVEYARD DISTURBANCE, UNTIL DEATH and DINNER WITH A VAMPIRE. In an interview on the DVD, Bava says they were “stories that I would have never turned into movies because they were too thin, too insubstantial.” Yeah, that tracks. He confirms that THE OGRE was absolutely not thought of as DEMONS 3, because “DEMONS was made for the cinema.” He says that “with Dario Argento as producer we tried to make the third sequel, but we gave up, and in the end that treatment was used to make THE CHURCH, made by Michele Soavi.”

Argento, who produced and co-wrote THE CHURCH (also released in 1989), seems to disagree that that one was ever related to the DEMONS movies. But other sources claim it was the sequel Bava developed and Soavi (STAGEFRIGHT) removed any connections when he took over.

THE CHURCH begins with a prologue in medieval Germany, where bucket-helmeted Teutonic Knights are told that a woman is a witch “spreading contagion,” so they kill her and then massacre an entire village of peasants, even their animals. The over-the-top brutality of it – they chop off their heads and then their horses stomp on the heads, among other atrocities – unfortunately seems torn from the headlines. It appears these are innocent peasants who have nothing to do with the nonsense these crazed zealots are talking about, even if the supernatural really exists in this movie. They dump the corpses into a pit and use the fact that one woman is still barely moving as evidence that demons are rising. They force an architect (John Richardson, BLACK SUNDAY) to build a church on top of it to supposedly keep the demons down, but it’s really keeping them from being haunted by their victims. A later flashback (SPOILER) reveals that the architect “was a learned man, and they feared him,” they accused him of being an alchemist because “everything you don’t understand you call alchemy, ascribing the plague to an invasion by the devil, mistaking illness for evil.”

So the great irony of the movie is that these ignorant so-called Christian mass murderers created a real plague of demons by imagining one. It’s the horror movie version of what all the western armies seem to do now, creating endless generations of blowback by terrorizing populations and calling them terrorists. In my opinion the Teutonic Knights and all their contemporary equivalents can and should fuck off.

The rest of the movie takes place at the cathedral in the present, as new librarian Evan (Tomas Arana, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES) hits it off with Hieronymous-Bosch-ripoff-fresco restorer Lisa (Barbara Cupisti, STAGEFRIGHT, OPERA) and meets a bushy-browed Bishop (Feodor Chaliapin Jr., FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, INFERNO), nice guy Father Gus (Hugh Quarshie, NIGHTBREED, THE PHANTOM MENACE), and the sacristan’s pre-teen daughter Lotte (Asia Argento), who likes to sneak out to go clubbing. Both Lisa and Lotte might be reincarnations of the massacred, since the actors appeared in the prologue.

The restoration of the church accidentally causes some cracks where Lisa finds a mysterious parchment.. Lisa tries to get Evan to explore her catacombs, but he gets distracted by the code on the parchment and ends up doing that in the church, searching for “a stone with seven eyes” and breaking a seal.

Oh – whoops.

He ends up scratched by a demon, seems kind of zombified, tries to call Lisa on a pay phone but can only moan. While she’s still asking “Who is this?” he tears open his chest, pulls out his beating heart, holds it next to the phone and then above his head like it’s baby Simba. Oh, okay, now you’re emotionally available. A little late there, pal.

This one takes its time getting going, but about halfway through people start being possessed by demons and it catches its wind. I love the part where Lisa’s attacked at the cabin so she tries to call the cops, and the phone cord gets pulled through the door so without a moment’s hesitation she dives headfirst through a closed window. Beautiful move. And while wearing a night gown! The cops show up to help her but she instinctively bites one of them (Soavi himself) on the hand.

Then it introduces a whole bunch of new characters and situations: a wedding party using the church, a class on a field trip – one of the kids awkwardly gives us the information that the church contains a self destruct button – and a hipster couple bickering because they might miss a concert due to his motorcycle not working and he thinks she likes some other guy named Frank. Always good to have goofy depictions of rebellious youth. They all get trapped when a mechanism is activated that seals the church to keep the evil in. The bride’s gown gets stuck in a door and they don’t want to cut her out because it’s a rental.

The implied sexual threat of the demons, especially to Lotte, is not pleasant, but the dominant tone is more fun than sleazy. The demons don’t usually have cool monster faces like in DEMONS, but Sergio Stivaletti is back so you do get a glimpse of this dude:

And the jealous biker guy hallucinates Frank stealing his girlfriend in the form of this Boris Vallejo painting come to life:

There’s an amazing goat man who I’m not gonna show because he’s forcing himself on someone in a ritual. But I will show you this pile of bodies that I thought was cool even before I realized it was also the goat man:

There are fun moments like when Lotte’s dad runs around with a spiky metal gate, there’s a spiky-metal-gate POV shot and then a POV shot from a lady who dropped her glasses and puts them back on just in time to see the thing impaling her neck. And there’s a conservative vs. liberal battle between the Bishop (who wants to allow the demonic plague to spread to punish sinners) and Father Gus (who prefers the self-sacrifice option, bringing the church down on top of themselves). One oversight: Father Gus is established to enjoy archery, but I don’t believe he shoots arrows at any demons (or the Bishop). But it’s a pretty good movie. Definitely way better than THE OGRE.

The music is credited to Goblin, in this case meaning bassist Fabio Pignatelli. Argento actually got Keith Emerson (who had done INFERNO) to record an entire score, but he thought it sucked ass and ditched everything but the main titles and a keyboard version of Bach’s Prelude 24. They also used some Philip Glass.

If they ever did plan for it to be a DEMONS sequel, there wouldn’t necessarily have to be a direct connection, I don’t think. I wondered if it would’ve drawn parallels between the knights on horseback and the motorcycle in the movie theater lobby (make a knight carry the same magic sword, for example), but that would be weird because, as Evan says here, the Teutonic Knights were cruel monsters who inspired Hitler. So they can keep their swords. One thing I swore I read somewhere was that they would’ve shown that the movie theater was built on the site of the church, and I like that idea, but I can’t find it anywhere anymore so it might’ve been a demonic vision I had. Best not to trust it.

Anyway, if you see only one movie that is not DEMONS 3, and the only choices are THE CHURCH and THE OGRE, definitely see THE CHURCH.