Black Demons

Veteran Umberto Lenzi spent most of the 90's directing routine actioneers and mediocre thrillers, but with Black Demons, an old-fashioned macumba horror movie, he made a welcome comeback to the land of the living dead.

Three American students, Kevin, Jessica and Dick, arrives to Rio de Janeiro and an old house outside the city. While in town Dick somehow gets invited to a voodoo ceremony. There he gets a strange amulet to wear around his neck which forces him to do weird things. Like waking up the dead or killing his pals for example. Soon enough the place is full of black negroe zombies claiming victims and it's up to Kevin and Jessica to fight the dead corpses back to their graves.

Now, what's most important is that Lenzi plays his game straight this time. There's no smiling zombies with machine guns here and no joking around. This is serious stuff, more in line with Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2. And while it's nowhere as gory as Fulci's film or Lenzi's previous zombie film Nightmare City, it still contains some striking images and a couple of gory effects (such as a woman getting a meat cleaver in the head and one eye poked out by a boat hook). But the budget seems to have been awfully low. A stylished photography and a great score (by Franco Micalizzi) do help surprisingly much but it can't hide the fact that the film would have benefitted from a bigger budget (and perhaps a few more actors as well). But the lack of money brings at least one good thing. It forces Lenzi to keep the film extremely tight and as a result it therefore never loses its focus. Sadly the acting is rather poor as well and Sonia Curtis isn't convincing enough as the heroine, but she reportedly got the role only after the original actress got food-poisoned the first day on the set. I doubt that Black Demons will be regarded a living dead-classic and Lenzi isn't George Romero. But the film is a fair zombie flick and worth seeking out for that.

© The Inzomniac's Movie Madness Review.