Film Review: Black Demons (directed by Umberto Lenzi)

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Lisa Marie Bowman

(Hi! This is actually a review that I wrote a while ago for an anthology of B-movie reviews that a “friend” of mine was planning on self-publishing. Much like this site, the book would be made up of different reviewers giving each film their own individual spin. We were going to call it Dinner and a Cannibal Movie. I came up with that title, by the way. Unfortunately, the project was eventually abandoned but not before I’d written a handful of reviews. Here’s one of the shorter ones, for Umberto Lenzi’s Black Demons. Oh, and be warned: Because of the nature of the project it was written for, this review is full of spoilers.)

Black Demons.

My ex-roommate Kim and I have a long-standing argument concerning this film. I claim that it’s an Umberto Lenzi zombie film that was made in 1991, long after Italian zombie cinema had run its course. It is also my contention that we saw this movie in October of 2004. Admittedly, we were performing our own private pagan ritual during most of the film’s 90-minute running time but we still paid enough attention to not be impressed by it. Kim, on the other hand, argues that we never watched Black Demons and that, furthermore, there is no such film as Black Demons. I suspect that a combination of her own rather prodigious liberal guilt and the film’s own utter banality has led her to repress the memory of it in much the same way as the protagonist of a Dario Argento thriller will often forget a key detail of a murder he has witnessed.

Black Demons tells the story of five young people who find themselves on the bad end of some black magic. For reasons that are never really made all that clear (largely because the entire cast has a bad habit of mumbling their dialogue), English Kevin is in Brazil with his American girlfriend, Jessica. Tagging along with them is Jessica’s half-brother, a morose young man who is recovering from a nervous breakdown and who has the rather unfortunate name of Dick. Along with having a vaguely incestuous relationship with Jessica (whether this was intentional on Lenzi’s part or just a case of bad acting is up for debate), Dick is also fascinated by black magic and has a tendency to wander off by himself a lot. This leads to a lot of scenes of Kevin and Jessica repeatedly shouting, “Dick! Dick!” as they search for him. This provided both me and Kim a lot of giggly amusement if nothing else.

Anyway, Dick attends a black magic ceremony that he records on audio tape and then proceeds to obsessively listen to whenever the movie needs an excuse to bring on a few zombies. The morning after the ceremony, our threesome’s jeep breaks down out in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, two hikers – Jose and his girlfriend, Sonya – come along and invite everyone to spend the night at Jose’s villa. As luck would have it, there’s a big cemetery located right behind the villa and idiot Dick decides to play his little audio tape right in the middle of it.

(I think Kim may have exclaimed, “God, what a dick,” at this point but she denies it along with the movie itself.)

Needless to say, this causes six zombies to rise from their graves and the usual hilarity follows. It turns out that these zombies were, in life, African slaves who rebelled against their white masters and were put to death as a result. Their eyes were plucked out as they died, though this doesn’t seem to keep them from being able to see once they come back to life. It turns out that the mission of these six black zombies is to kill six white people to even the score. Unfortunately, most of this is explained by Jose who has such an incredibly thick accent that it is next to impossible to understand a word he says. Therefore, the plot may actually be a bit more complex than I realize.

Though, I doubt it.

As Kim and I immediately realized, the zombies need to kill six white people. Yet there are only five white people in the film. Whether this was a case of lazy writing or maybe an actor walked off the film at the last minute, I do not know. However, Lenzi ingeniously handles this problem by killing an anonymous, never-seen white guy offscreen and then having our heroes hear about it on the radio. Still, you have to wonder why these zombies, seeking vengeance for being slaves in their past life, would only feel the need to kill six white people. Sure, it works out in the sense that there are six zombies and this way they only have to kill one person apiece. But still, it seems like they’re letting the white race off a little bit easily here. Indeed, if the solution to all of the world’s racial strife is simply to kill off the five, uninteresting losers in this film, then I have to side with the zombies on this one.

Unfortunately, Kevin and Jessica aren’t willing to sacrifice themselves for world harmony and insist on surviving until the end of the movie. Kevin eventually figures out that the zombies can be stopped by a well-thrown Molotov cocktail. How exactly he figured this out isn’t really clear. Perhaps he saw it in another, better zombie film. (Like Lucio Fulci’s Zombie 2, for instance. Unfortunately, beyond the Molotovs, the bad acting of the female lead, and a grisly fetish for showing eyeballs getting damaged, these two films have little in common.) Kevin’s plan works though not before the tragic ends of Sonya, Jose, the phantom sixth white guy, and yes, even Dick. Leaving behind a bunch of smoldering slaves, Jessica and Kevin flee the villa for a world still torn apart with racial strife and anger. Thanks a lot, guys!

Almost all good horror is to be found in subtext. Such as, Dracula may be pretty intimidating with his fangs and his blood drinking and all, but it’s as a symbol of unbridled lust and secret fantasies that he’s been able to become and remain an icon for over a century. And while Frankenstein might be frightening to look at, his true power comes from being a sign of what happens when man attempts to play God. In an admittedly less literary vein, what else is a truly scary slasher but proof positive over how little control we truly have over our own future? Strictly on paper, Black Demons should be a film awash in powerful subtext. After all, these zombies wouldn’t even exist if they hadn’t been enslaved and treated like property by the ancestors of the film’s heroes. In a world that is still struggling (and failing) to deal with the legacy of racism, a film in which a bunch of slaves come back to life and seek vengeance on only whites should have quite a bit to say. Perhaps if Black Demons had been directed by Fulci or Deodato, it would have done just that. However, this film was directed by Umberto Lenzi which means that it ends with Kevin assuring Jessica that their nightmare is over with the camera ominously (and, quite frankly, obscenely) pans over to a bunch of black children playing on the side of the road, basically equating those living children with a bunch of bloodthirsty, vengeful zombies on the basis of the color of their skin. Whether Lenzi realized what he was doing or not, this one camera movement manages to be a hundred times more offensive than anything found in Cannibal Apocalypse.

Perhaps, in this case, Kim had the right idea.

Film Review: Zombie 5: Killing Birds (dir. by Claudio Lattanzi and Joe D’Amato)

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Thanks to the wonderful people at Anchor Bay, I recently watched Zombie 5: Killing Birds, one of the last of the old school Italian horror films.

Admittedly, when I first hit play on the DVD player, I was expecting the worst. Of all the various official and unofficial sequels to Lucio Fulci’s masterpiece Zombi 2 (which, of course, was itself an unofficial prequel to Dawn of the Dead), Zombie 5: Killing Birds has the worst reputation. While most Italian horror fans seem to agree that Zombie 4 is enjoyable on its own stupid terms and even Zombi 3 has a few brave defenders, its hard to find anyone willing to defend Killing Birds. The general consensus has always seemed to be that Killing Birds is a generic and rather forgettable splatter film that, title aside, had absolutely nothing in common with the Fulci classic.

Having now seen Killing Birds, I can say that the general consensus, in this case, is largely correct. Killing Birds is generic, predictable, and ultimately forgettable. However, taken on its own terms, it’s a perfectly enjoyable way for a lover of zombie cinema to waste 90 minutes. As long as you don’t compare it to Zombi 2, i’ts a perfectly tolerable piece of trash that actually has one or two memorable moments tossed randomly through its running time. At the very least, its a hundred times better than Umberto Lenzi’s similar Black Demons.

The film deals with a bunch of grad students who, while searching for a nearly extinct species of Woodpecker, end up spending the night at a deserted house in Louisiana. Many years ago, a brutal murder was committed at this house and, well, you can guess the rest. The grad students end up falling prey to a bunch of zombies, largely because the students are all remarkably stupid. Meanwhile, B-movie veteran Robert Vaughn shows up as Dr. Fred Brown, a blind man who spends his days studying birds. There’s a lot of birds in this movie and its never quite clear how they link up to the living dead but they certainly do look menacing flying past the camera.

With the exception of Vaughn (who overacts just enough to keep things interesting without going so far over the top as to become ludicrous), the film’s cast is likeable but not memorable. Everyone’s playing a stereotype (i.e., the leader, the computer geek, the slut, the girl with looks and brains) and no one makes much of an effort to be anything more than a stereotype. While this certainly keeps Killing Birds from displaying anything resembling nuance, it’s also strangely comforting. Its lets a neurotic viewer like me know, from the start, that there’s no need to think too much about anything she might see for the next hour and a half. Since this movie was made in the late 80s, most of the men sport a mullet and all of the women wear those terribly unflattering khaki pants that I guess were all the rage back then.

As I stated before, the film does have its occasional strengths. Some of the deaths are memorably nasty (even if the gore effects are decidedly cut-rate, pun not intended). As well, the film does an excellent job at capturing the hot, humid atmosphere of the Louisiana bayous. I’ve spent enough time in that part of the country that I can attest that the movie perfectly captures the stagnant heat and the way dehydration can cause your mind to play tricks on you. While the zombies themselves are hardly as impressive as Fulci’s, the filmmakers wisely keep them in the shadows for most of the film and, if nothing else, this allows the viewer to imagine something scarier than what they’re actually seeing. Finally, this movie does have one of the most effective nightmare sequences that I’ve ever seen. Lasting barely a minute and not really having much to do with the overall plot, this nightmare still features some rather disturbing imagery. One image, in particular, has so stuck with me that I found myself paying homage to it in a my own writing.

Though the movie’s director is credited as being Claudio Lattanzi, it is pretty much an open secret that the movie was actually directed by the infamous Joe D’Amato (who, regardless of what else he may have done during his storied life, also directed one of my favorite movies ever, Beyond The Darkness). I’ve read a few interviews where D’Amato said that he allowed Lattanzi to be credited as director because he wanted to help Lattanzi’s launch his own career. To judge by the movie itself, however, it seems more probable that Lattanzi wasn’t delivering the movie that D’Amato wanted and D’Amato stepped in as a result. Regardless, Killing Birds is hardly the best example of D’Amato’s work but, at the same time, it’s hardly the worst either.

In the end, Killing Birds is a movie that will probably be best appreciated by those who already have a good working knowledge of Italian exploitation films. It’s hardly a masterpiece (and, despite enjoying it, I would hesitate to even call it a “good” movie) but it’s not really deserving of all the criticism that it’s received over the years either. As a bonus, the Anchor Bay DVD come with a lengthy interview with Robert Vaughn in which he discussed his career in B-movies and, while Vaughn says nothing about Killing Birds during the interview, he’s still interesting and enjoyable to listen to. Unlike a lot of “reputable” actors who have made B-movies, Vaughn never condescends to the films that both started and ended his movie career.