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. (read the rest of this shit…)
Lamberto Bava’s DEMONS is from 1985 and it’s a thoroughly 1985 movie in a very good way. It has a catalog of tough punk type side characters, a very danceable electronic score by Goblin keyboardist Claudio Simonetti, and somewhat random rock soundtrack including “White Wedding” by Billy Idol and “Walking On The Edge” by Rick Springfield. It has lots of atmosphere and stylized imagery with colored lighting that makes the frame look like a blue or yellow screen printing, and a handful of scenes just starkly showing a strip of flashy businesses around the mysterious Metropol movie theater where it takes place. Gothic horror downtown.
(This review is pretty detailed and spoilery. The movie is great, so consider just watching it and coming back.)
In 2022, a transgressive gorefest called 
For their 1978 remake of 
Don Siegel’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956) is a fun movie and a bonafide sci-fi/horror classic for the resonance of its premise alone. A group of friends notice some people acting odd in their California town, then find a strange humanoid drone body that turns out to be the result of alien seeds that drifted through space and grew pods that create lookalike bodies of humans and replace them. The doppelgangers duplicate every cell and even the memories of the infected, but they lack human emotions. The more observant people start realizing their loved ones aren’t themselves, but nobody believes them.
A couple years ago, you may remember, I was kind of giving up on my Slasher Search tradition, because the pickings were getting really slim when it came to the type of undiscovered ‘80s slasher I was looking for. Some of you talked me into broadening or adjusting the criteria, so I’ve been experimenting with the mostly more modern horror obscurities that can be found scrolling through the horror sections on Tubi and similar free streaming services. That’s been going okay so far, so I’ll try dipping in a little again this year and see what happens.
For today’s special programming I tried out two movies that stretch the definition of “slasher,” but they seem at least tangentially related to supernatural slashers like Freddy and Candyman. Or at least one of them has Tony Todd in it. Okay, these are not really slashers, they’re action horror. Instead of a final girl running from a killer they have a martial artist who falls into monster troubles and has to fight.
IN A VIOLENT NATURE was one of this year’s most hyped and intriguing indie horror movies. It’s a slasher hailing from the land of Canada (see also: 
This may be lost to time now, but back in the aughts when 
A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE is something rare and kind of lovely: a big franchise genre movie that uses those expensive trappings for something modest, simple and beautiful. As the title implies, it takes place right before and during the initial onslaught of super-hearing monsters from space that eat anybody who makes a sound, quickly causing the fall of society and leaving a smattering of by-necessity-non-verbal post-apocalyptic survivors. We get those monsters, some tense set pieces, some clever ways to deal with them, some (I believe) new information about how they work and how mankind first reacted. But really it could be almost any disaster scenario, because what’s great about it is that it spends this day of almost certain doom with a protagonist who was already about to die anyway.
