All good movies "inspire" some direct to video copycat flick. I was afraid that "Gladiator" wasn't really that good a film, because I hadn't seen any movie that had anything remotely resembling anything Roman on the new releases shelf for months. Then I spotted Full Moon's latest offering, Demonicus. I'm a fan of Full Moon's Puppetmaster series, and Blood Dolls, but had never seen one of their non-killer puppet films. Anyway...
Demonicus chronicles what happens to a group of campers in the mountains of the Alps. One of the campers, James, finds a cave with old gladiator artifacts, and feels impelled to remove a helmet from a corpse and try it on. He becomes possessed, and, as the demonic gladiator Tyrannus, is impelled to kill his friends to revive the corpse, who is the real Tyrannus.
Granted, like many Full Moon films, this has little or no budget. At times, the editing and direction was so amateurish I'd swear I was watching the Blair Witch Project. The attempts at chopping off of limbs and heads reminds me of a Monty Python skit. The weapons, although apparently real, look really plastic-y. It literally looks like this was filmed by a group of friends with a digital camcorder on a weekend. Granted, there's nothing wrong with such film-making, just don't rent this expecting a technical masterpiece. It looks like there were attempts at research for the script too, because, even though Tyrannus really doesn't act much like a gladiator until the end, at least he speaks Latin.
All trashing aside, I actually enjoyed this film. Not as much as a killer puppet film, perhaps, but Full Moon still delivers! The only thing that disappointed me was there was no Full Moon Videozone at the end!

The first Home Alone was a decent enough film... the sequel was pretty much the same, at a new setting. This one tries to be original, and succeeds to some degree... of course, the formula is basically the same, so it's like watching the same movie for a third time with slightly altered plot. The new score is quite bad(though the new "setting traps" piece was, if nothing else, interesting and different), especially compared to the grand score of the first, and the almost-but-not-quite-as-good score of the second. It (almost) makes up for it by using some pretty good non-original music, but it's just not the same. The plot is fair, and somewhat original to the franchise, but it's still basically the same movie as the first two, with worse acting and a less impressive example of the 'scary character turning out to be good'. The acting is mostly unimpressive. The characters are mostly caricatures. The new thieves are less entertaining than the old ones(and they make fun of spy-stuff, which is almost criminal, given the limited amount of good spy flicks there are, and how precious few of them are cool). The fact that there are more of them(and thereby more traps) is just a weak attempt at trying to go one higher than the first two films... and it doesn't work. The idea behind the thieves and their mission is a tad too... adult and serious for a children's film(and there was a sexual joke or two, though that isn't the first time in the series). It's also unnecessarily complex, as is the plot in general. I could follow it, but I doubt a kid could. Some of the exposition are delivered so obviously that even children may find it stupid. The animal stuff is generally not amusing. There are fewer siblings, which should mean that those there are get developed more, but they have less personality than the least featured of those of the first two films. All in all, just not particularly good, or worth watching, unless you *really* love watching criminals getting hurt in cartoon-y violence. I recommend this to huge fans of the series only. 3/10