Demonia

Plot synopsis:
Sicily, 1486. A mob of villagers drag five screaming and struggling nuns into a cavern beneath their convent, built atop a steep hillside. They are tortured and nailed to five of the many wooden crosses in the underground chamber.
Toronto, Canada, present day 1990. A séance is in progress. A young woman named Liza (Meg Register), has a vision of the crucified nuns and falls screaming onto the floor. She is taken home where her boyfriend Professor Paul Evans (Brett Halsey), a noted archaeologist and her former college professor, comforts her.
Several months later. Liza and Professor Evans are surveying Ancient Greek ruins on a site near the small town of Santa Rosalia, Sicily. With them is a team of assistants who are meant to be helping, but spend most of their time drinking. Liza is distracted by the beautiful, but ominous ruin of a monastery which overlooks the dig. Professor Evans chides her for exhibiting a morbid interest in the rumors surrounding the ruins history. The include tales of unspeakable practices conducted there in medieval times. He reminds her that she is supposed to be avoiding any involvement with the supernatural since her mental breakdown back in Canada months earlier.
At the quayside, the professor talks to Porter (Al Cliver), a colleague on his sailboat all about the ruins history in which Porter persuades him to avoid the ruins and concentrate more on the Greek ruins. Also hanging around the dig is Turi De Simone (Lino Salemme), the hot-tempered local butcher, who voices the town's hostility to the strangers. He follows Liza into the ruined building and warns her not to go any further, but she continues after he leaves. In the monastery crypt, Liza becomes convinced that there is another chamber behind a wall and attacks it with a pick-axe. Sure enough, she discovers a cavern containing the charred remains of the five nuns hanging on wooden crosses.
Liza runs outside in horror and bumps into Professor Evans. He seems intent on browbeating her into suppressing all mention of what she found. But the opening of the crypt has apparently freed the spirits of the five nuns, putting into motion a series of supernatural events. That evening, Porter is killed on his boat when he is shot with a harpoon gun by a ghostly nun, who then disappears.
The next day, the people in the village are feeling so irate against the outsiders near their community that the young butcher, Turi, can openly discuss murdering the visitors. Meanwhile, Liza pursues her investigation into the monastery by checking the local church records at the local library, but discovers a huge sheaf of pages missing. A strange-looking woman (Carla Cassola) appears in the dusty corridors and invites Liza to meet her the following day at her apartment to hear the whole story.
That evening, two of the archaeologists, Irishmen Sean (Grady Thomas Clarkson) and Kevin (Pascal Druant), get blind drunk and decide to wander the ruins. They hear giggling female voices and see flittering shadows. Following them, Sean and Kevin are killed when they fall through a weak floorboard and land into a pit of metal spikes. The following morning, Inspector Carter (Lucio Fulci) from Interpol arrives to investigate the deaths, and to question Professor Evans on his knowledge of the area.
The next day, Liza meets with the old woman as arranged in her apartment. The old woman tells Liza about what happened at the ruins centuries ago. The nuns practiced witchcraft and held orgies there as well. Local youths wound be invited there for sex, then murdered as they reached orgasm. The nuns would drink their blood in a satanic frenzy. If any one of the crazed nuns would become pregnant, they would carry their unwanted babies to full term, then throw them onto a fire after giving birth to them.
Meanwhile, the police investigation into the dig becomes more urgent when Inspector Carter arrives at the marina looking for Evans' colleague Porter, whose severed head is found impaled on the anchor of his yacht. In town, the old woman is the next victim when she is attacked by her pet cats and she is clawed to death, her eyes scratched out. When Professor Evans makes a casual remark to Inspector Carter, he puts suspicion on Turi the butcher. But that evening, Turi is killed as he is closing up his shop when an unseen figured dressed in all white attacks him in his walk-in freezer. The figure stabs him with a meat-hook though his neck, and his tongue is nailed to the chopping board. Inspector Carter arrives later that night with the local police to investigate when Turi's wife has called them to report her husband's disappearance. Carter finds Turi's dead body locked in the freezer. Carter also finds a piece of torn clothing clutched in Turi's right hand which apparently belonged to his killer.
Suspicion on Turi's murder first falls on Professor Evans who reacts by announcing that the dig will be abandoned, but Liza, acting more and more strangely, refuses to leave.
The next morning, news of the death of Turi has incensed the townspeople who mount an attack on the haunted ruins. Professor Evans tries to get his team clear, but he can't find Liza, who had wandered off during the night. John (Ettore Comi) and Susie (Christina Engelhardt), a married couple on the team, realize their young son Robby has gone missing too. John runs through a nearby woods looking for Robby, while Professor Evans goes off to look for Liza. Meanwhile, Robby is being dragged through the woods by a white-robed, faceless nun. The little boy pulls free and runs through the woods back to camp. Then, Robby inexplicably discovers his father tied by the ankles between two bent saplings. Running to help, the boy trips a rope, the trees spring upright, and John is literally ripped in half down the middle. The blood-splattered Robby returns to the archaeology camp, too traumatized to speak to his screaming and hysterical mother when she finds him covered in blood.
Professor Evans runs towards the ruins looking for Liza who appears dressed in a white robe, obviously possessed by the leader of the evil nuns. With a huge mob of townspeople advancing not far behind him, Professor Evans runs into the ruins after Liza who turns around and stabs him in the stomach with a butcher knife, and then disappears like a ghost. The mob of townspeople charge into the ruins, running past Professor Evans lying severely wounded on the ground. The mob converge on the hidden chamber and Liza reappears, foaming at the mouth on one of the crosses. The mob sets her and all the skeletal remains of the nuns afire. The wounded Professor Evans staggers into the cavern, pushing the mob members out of his way, to see Liza materialize at the foot of the burning crosses, no longer possessed but dead.

Tags: violence

Review:
It didn't stink, but it was nowhere near the brilliance of "Zombie." It was more like "Gates Of Hell," a so-so plot with some decent scenes to keep us interested.Italian nuns get crucified in medieval Italy for...wait for it...being a secret satanic coven.
Years later (aka present day) they rise and attack a Canadian archaeology team digging under the ancient churches.Lucio re-did his zombie films with nuns.
Not the worst of Fulci's films (MANHATTAN BABY wins that dubious distinction in my book...) but DEMONIA takes so long to get to any of the classic Fulci "good-stuff", that you'll probably be asleep by then.Two archaeologists are digging around Sicily, and the locals don't like it too much.
The locals don't like the scientists messing around in their backyards, and when some strange deaths occur around the dig-site, all hell breaks loose.Luckily, DEMONIA does come with the "goods" towards the end.
A good tongue-hammering, and a guy split in half are a couple of the notable scenes - unfortunately, the story isn't interesting enough for you to care by the time you get there.
Worth a look to the TRUE Fulci fan - don't expect a gore-fest masterpiece...5/10.
Deceptive Lucio Fulci's Gore Movie.
In 1990, in Toronto, the skeptical archaeologist Professor Paul Evans (Brett Halsey) and his superstitious colleague Liza Harris (Meg Register) explore with their team the medieval dig where the nuns were killed.
Liza has dreadful nightmares with the nuns while members of the expedition mysteriously die and the locals are against the research in the archaeological site."Demonia" is a deceptive Lucio Fulci's gore movie.
Wow.....I like "Zombie," "The Beyond," even have a special place for "The Gates of Hell."  For some idea of this one's rank in the Fulci canon, "Aenigma" is better.
A team of archaeologists are exploring the ruins of an ancient crypt in Sicily where five heretic nuns had been stoned and crucified by superstitious villagers.One of them Liza starts to suffer terrible nightmares about the nuns and other members of the team start to die in particularly horrible ways."Demonia" is a mediocre Lucio Fulci's nunsploitation flick that offers surprisingly little amount of gore including a tongue nailed to a barrel an,eye-gouging and an "Inferno in Diretta"-style decapitation between two springy trees.Still the film is well-shot,picturesque and enjoyable enough to give it a 6 out of 10.However if you are new into Fulci I suggest watching first "The Beyond" or "City of the Living Dead"..
Italian horror legend Lucio Fulci (1927-1996) did a great amount of atmospheric and wonderful Spaghetti horrors during his prolific career, his masterpieces being Zombie Flesh-Eaters (1979), The Beyond (1981), The House by the Cemetery (1982) and Don't Torture a Duckling (1972) among many other more or less interesting and noteworthy films from the horror or other genres.
But his career has the other side, too, these ultra braindead cheapies that are so painful to watch especially if one appreciates the director at all.Demonia is Fulci's attempt in the nunsploitation genre, at least kind of.
This is shown as a flashback, just like in his The Beyond, but so much less effectively and it comes clear in this very beginning that even the gore effects are very bad and stupid in the film.
Then we jump to the present day as some group of archeologists search for treasures from the historic times (if I'm correct, the mentioned nun killing took place in the sixteenth century) and naturally neither the villagers nor the raising evil spirits like this too much and soon the bloody killings begin...as well as all the possible errors and negative sides a film can have.There are hardly any positive things to be said about this piece of cinematic garbage.
Some of the dream sequences and close-ups of frightened eyes remind me distantly of Lucio Fulci but still, there's nothing in the imagery that would save the film.
What's there is the graphic gore and very boring 80 minutes.The film almost gives a new meaning to the phrase "dead boring" as it has some laughably long dialogue sequences which almost force to stop the viewing.
The characters are uninteresting, but fortunately don't over-act too much, the plot is nothing too special (but could have been interesting if made by Fulci ten years earlier) and every single element in the piece screams in tired pain as does the viewer too.
The film also looks very amateurish as if done by a bunch of amateurs and it is no wonder this didn't even have a theatrical run in Italy.The gore scenes are also very bad and the effects don't even look real as they did in the classics, created by Gianneto de Rossi.
And the guy really has a tongue that makes Gene Simmons look green in comparison.Demonia is a very, very bad film even as a fan of Lucio Fulci.
It is so bad, as unfortunately was the state of Fulci's career when he was forced to make films like these.
Gore that's on par with a home movie...Lucio Fulci is high on my list of favorite directors (check out his early-'80's output to see what I mean), but "Demonia" is one of his worst movies, not even worth the trouble to revive on video, in my opinion.Zero/10.
The picture quality just was off as if I were to pick which Fulci film was the oldest between "The Beyond", "City of the Living Dead", "House By the Cemetery" and "Zombie" I would say this one was the oldest.
You will also see a very strange death as a man chases after his son in one scene, boy gets away and dad is somehow staked in the ground his legs in the air and let me just say good death that may have had a bit more impact if said character had been established.
Better than "Manhattan Baby", a film I saw by him a couple of days earlier, but this one too suffers from this need of the man to just shoot random things at times.
"Demonia" of 1990 is one of the last films by Italian Horror/Gore deity Lucio Fulci, and while it certainly ranges among the man's lesser achievements it is still a stylish little film that should be enjoyed by his fans.
Yet the film is interesting in its Fulci-typical style and atmosphere and features several truly creepy moments as well as some spectacular gore-scenes.
What also makes the film worth checking out is the fact that the master himself has a role - Fulci plays a police Inspector.
Demonia seems to be a movie by Lucio Fulci that I don't know about...
the death scenes in this movie are corny and are not the same to other death scenes in Fulci's earlier films, mainly the ones from the late 70's to middle 80's.
If you're a true Fulci fan (like me), then this is your movie.
Demonia, the 'What the Babuguganosh!?' moment of Fulci's career.Also, Al Cliver (Zombi 2) actually is in this movie, though he is credited as Al Clever...
Demonia is somewhat of a disapointment and one of the lesser works of legendary Lucio Fulci towards the end of his run in making movies.
This film has Canadian archaeologists come to Italy to check out some Greco/Roman stuff, but leading lady Meg Register is more interested in the ruins of an old monastery that involved a Satanic nun coven that haunts the small town of Santa Ria. Meg Register is pretty wooden and bland as the lead in the film and with the micro budget and poor directing job from Fulci, Demonia is not such an easy watch.
I did watch the complete film in pieces at a time though and it does deliver on having an atmosphere of dread, set on location at a real monastery with a tomb of real dead corpses.
Demonia is a very, very flawed film, but at its core is still a half way decent horror movie with great ambiance and gore..
Perhaps you may recognize that this is kind of how Fulci began City of the Living Dead.Liza then joins an archaeology team led by Professor Evans (Brett Halsey, The Devil's Honey) as they visit Greek ruins near Sicily.
And even after Professor Evans warns Liza to stay away from the unknown after the way she reacted to the seance, she enters the crypt within the ruins.Using a pickaxe, she breaks into the wall and finds the remains of the nuns, angering the Professor and setting off a series of murders, like Porter being killed by a nun with a harpoon gun and two members of the team being killed by metal spikes.Ignoring Turi's angry rebuke, Liza enters the monastery crypt.
The kind of evil nuns that make Lille's cats eat her the moment Fulci leaves.
Robby, a young boy, gets kidnapped by a white nun with no face, but he escapes just in time to watch his father get torn in half.
They set the crosses on fire again and everyone is destroyed, leaving the Professor to stagger in, bloodied, where he sees Liza's dead body.There are some great shots in the open here, with the camera wildly swinging through the seance and the nuns being executed.
It's dull, seems incredibly long (though isn't)and even the odd gore scene which aren't very frequent or impressive do little to relieve the boredom.This seems to be the work of someone running low on ideas and, I'm sorry to say, motivation.
I'd recommend House Of Clocks, Touch Of Death or Cat in the Brain for a taste of Fulci's later works.Go for one of his many other classics, ignore this unless you're a completist like me and have to have it all!.
With "Demonia", Fulci offers us again a supernatural horror movie.
What follows is a very uneven film, lacking the pace of Fulci's previous horror movies.
Finally, the ending is abrupt and completely disappointing.Nevertheless, the movie is still enjoyable, at least for Fulci fans.
The movie also contains some reasonably well executed gore scenes, such as a feline attack, a tongue impalement, and a body torn apart.Finally, it is fun to watch Fulci play the part of a police inspector (for budgetary reasons, as Helsey explains in an interview).
No, it's not the name of a disinfectant used by exorcists, but rather the title of Lucio Fulci's 1989 film about demonic possession on the island of Sicily.Brett Halsey and Meg Register star as a pair of archeologists, one sensible and scientific, the other sensitive and superstitious, whose latest dig is plagued by a series of violent, non-Mafia-related deaths.
Fulci stumbles further by having his heroine plagued by nightmares that offer no information beyond what we already saw in the prologue.Fulci himself turns up late in the film as an inspector from Scotland Yard, only to turn up clues to a mystery that is no mystery to us; worse yet, Fulci's Inspector Carter's last scene finds him eyeballing a piece of cloth (torn from the habit of one of the murderous ghost-nuns), identifying it as centuries old, and then disappearing from the film entirely).
Al Cliver (aka Pier Luigi Conti) appears as Porter, a fellow archeologist who meets an untimely end at the hands of a transparent, headless, speargun-toting haint (Fulci regular Cliver is billed in the credits as Al "Clever").The film perks up a bit halfway through, when the local medium (a character similar to one played by Rada Rassimov in Mario Bava's BARON BLOOD) meets her predetermined demise by dint of half a dozen cat hand puppets, but DEMONIA is still slow going.
Watch out for those nude killer nuns!Lets face it, Italian horror isn't anymore what it used to be and all of the best movies were made mostly in the '70's and '80's.
The gore that is in the movie looks quite amateur like.
This film comes up short in many areas, but it's still not Fulci's worst (it's better than "Aenigma", for sure).
The script is thin, and the ending makes no sense, but there are enough well-executed gore set-pieces (considering the budget, the scene where a man gets split in two is a real dazzler!) to make the picture worth seeing, if only for horror fans.
"Demonia" is one of the master horror director Lucio Fulci's final achievements and, though not exactly one of his finest ones, it remains a truly interesting film for his many avid fans to track down and enjoy.
The first half hour is tame and slow and, generally speaking, the entire film isn't nearly as gory as Fulci's previous highlights (though there's one jaw-dropping scene that compensates for nearly everything), but the script is ambitiously compelling and the atmospheric Sicilian settings are quite wonderful.
The depiction of the eerie nun's face on the cover looks appealing, but "Demonia" has really nothing in common with the so-called "Nunsploitation" movies that also primarily came out of Italy.
The nuns in this film were barbarically crucified by angry villagers in the catacombs of their Sicilian monastery in the late 15th Century.
Unfortunately several sequences are extremely overlong and tedious, as if our good friend the directors thought it was necessary to endlessly stretch the plot to reach the running time of the film.
Shame actually, because in case of a little less padding and pointlessness, "Demonia" could have been a modest classic listed directly underneath his best works "The Beyond", "City of the Living Dead", "House by the Cemetery", "Cat in the Brain" and "Zombi 2".
Archaeologist team Professor Paul Evans (Brett Halsey) and his partner (Meg Register) begin to realize early on that something isn't right.DEMONIA is a later day Lucio Fulci film, which is actually slightly better than its reputation.
By this time the Italian horror market was taking its last gasps of air so if you're expecting something that looks or feels like ZOMBIE or THE BEYOND then you're certainly going to be disappointed.
With that said, if you've seen Fulci's later day films like THE GHOSTS OF SODOM then you'll be happy to see that this here is better than that.The biggest issue with DEMONIA is the same thing that haunted a lot of these films and that's the fact that there just wasn't enough money to pull everything off.
As I said, the budget was certainly very low here but Fulci still managed to build up a nice atmosphere and there's some minor gore, which his fans will enjoy.
Al Cliver (ZOMBIE) also appears briefly.DEMONIA certainly isn't a classic movie and if you're new to Fulci it's certainly not the place to start watching.
The great Lucio Fulci made some great films in his career - Don't Torture a Duckling and Zombie Flesh Eaters to name but two; but in his twilight years, his career took a bit of a downfall with the likes of The Door to Silence and Voices from Beyond; but he did at least manage one decent effort towards the end of his career - and that is this film.
The cover may suggest Demonia to be an attempted revival of the nunsploitation sub-genre, but in fact this is much more like the Fulci who earned himself the 'Godfather of Gore' title and the film is more along the lines of The Beyond.
It has to be said that the gore scenes are the main attraction, but at least the plot serves some relevance to the proceedings, Demonia is not one of the Fulci's finest achievements; but it's a rather decent little gore flick and Fulci fans will surely find something to like..
"Demonia" is a nice little gore flick, a late venture of Fulci's into the world of nunsploitation.
Someone gets ripped apart like a turkey in one scene and there are plenty of scary ghost-nuns.
As for me, it's probably top bottom of Lucio Fulci's movies and it's a little pity, because the plot is quite good..
The story is simple, satanic nuns from the 15th century, orgies, blood drinking, burning at the cross, then present day possession and more killings.
The stories were not great, but good, but you can tell while watching a Fulci film, that the guy actually thought about the scene/cinematography, lighting, editing.
An amateur filmmaker like Argento would show each and every nun getting nailed.More I watch Fulci films, more I appreciate his work.
This is such an unimpressive movie from Lucio Fulci.
These past horrors come to light (again) in modern times when a long sealed ancient church vault is opened up by a young researcher.The film has a very slight plot, and doesn't do well with it.
The story seems to vaguely show it's lead heroine, played by Meg Register, being possessed by the long dead evil nuns and taking revenge on various members of the village, but none of this is clear.
Because this is a Fulci film, and people want to know, I am going to tell you what happens - but this obviously means SPOILERS...
Even a bad Fulci is worth the time to watch.
Liza Harris (Meg Register) had vision of nuns being killed in a séance, and now she is in the basement of a monastery in Sicily searching for ...what?
The ending wasn't very clear, and probably the weakest part of the film.But, like I said, bad Fulci is still Fulci worth having..
First of all,everyone knows Lucio Fulci from his blood-soaked films and his hardcore content but this film is one of the worst ever.Lets go to the subject,Liza explores archaeological sites with a group of archeologies,some day Liza found an old mortuary where some nuns have died by the villagers and she unleashed the ghost of nuns to kill for revenge.Not so simply like other movies of fulci but is so boring and hilarious at the first part of 50 minutes.The second part which approximately 30 minutes before the end is atmospheric and gory but the main part is awful.Stay away from this film is boring.