Demonicus is another flick I’ve yet to see from my favorite years of Full Moon (’99 to ’03), so I was hyped to watch it. I’m not sure if I feel let down or just so-so about it..but we’ll get into that.
Demonicus starts out with some wonderful stock footage of the mountains in Italy and had me fooled for a second into thinking this was going to be shot on actual film. It’s not..definitely DV., which is evident in the first 30 seconds of ‘live action’.
We first meet James and Theresa who are trekking through previously mentioned mountains (except in Los Angeles) as some sort of competition between numerous couples to reach a pre-determined meeting place first. Theresa, who’s actually pretty attractive by b-horror standards, of course is tired and wants to rest while James, a “man’s man”, wants to keep plodding on. After some padding, in the form of “hiking”, James and Theresa reach a point where the ma’am can no longer continue without a rest and James conveniently finds a cave he absolutely must check out.
Upon traversing through the cave, James comes upon an odd shrine-ish area and eventually stumbles on a dilapidated, yet somewhat preserved corpse, donning gladiator-type gear including a helmet. James of course is interested and dons the helmet. Woops. Seconds later he begins speaking in Latin and dons the gladiator gear promising his new “master” that he will bring him back to life. K.
James exits the shrine area and quickly waxes his girl in a poorly done fashion where kool-aid thin fake blood covers the camera lens. Weak. He then takes off.
Next we meet Frankie and Charlene who also speak of this competition we are assumed to know all about and are also hiking their way through the treacherous mountains. Flash forward a few minutes and derp..they run in to James, now known as “Tyranus” who proceeds to hack off Frankie’s arm, then leg with a sword. This was actually a cool kill. Charlene also gets it and well..that takes care of that.
Up next is Anthony and Gina (played by the smoking hot Venesa Talor) blah blah blah in the mystical race voyage, doing some hiking, blah blah. They make a pit-stop to do the wild thang and keep along thereafter.
The last couple, Joe and Maria join the fray and end up being the first couple to reach the site, thus winning the “race”. They are joined shortly thereafter by Dino, who provides some comic relief. His back-story involves his girl leaving him for a waiter at an Italian restaurant where, we later learn, the couples shared some delicious gelato.
Now that we are set-up, let’s ‘review fast forward’ pas Anthony falling to Tyranus as well as the abduction (although it appeared as though she died) of Maria and trickery Tyranus employs to lure Joe and Dino eventually resulting in Joe’s demise.
Without spoiling things, Demonicus comes back for about the last 5 minutes of this 70ish minute afair and there is a nice little twist at the end for a FM horror affair.
As mentioned at the beginning of this review, I’m on the fence about Demonicus. It still has that late 90′s early 00′ charm though. Most of it is pretty bad and the DV camera work especially puts it behind. The editing is poor, the soundtrack is repetitive and boring and the acting is largely terrible. But there were some redeeming moments and the girls were mostly attractive, especially Gina. For some inexplicable reason, she sports an extremely bulky bubble coat that doubles the size of her torso and only shows her extremely nice figure and ample bosom towards the very end. Unfortunately there is no nudity at all in this, although I plan on checking out Venesa Talor in other Full Moon flicks (several sci-fi movies) and Blood Dolls.:D
*** out of 5.
