Director Lamberto Bava and and European horror legend, Dario Argento, team up yet again in Demons 2. Like in the first movie, the gore effects are first rate. You really do see some stuff in this film that you would probably never see in a North American horror movie. One example would be the child character that becomes a demon. But as I’ve seen in other Bava films, he has never been afraid to have child characters be victims of violence.

I really wanted to love this movie, but it just had so much wrong with it. The setting of the movie theater in the first movie was a lot more effective than the apartment building in this film. The most annoying thing about the apartment building is that the doors seem to be in a very poor state of repair. Some times they open, but the moment a demon shows up and someone has to run away, the same door that was opening with ease before is locked or jammed. For a building equipped with state of the art bullet proof glass, one would think the architects would have also included state of the art doors that open when you need them to. I could be wrong. May be it was the demons who kept locking the doors. May be they have a new power that enables them to lock doors without ever touching them. If that’s the case, such an ability would rank high up there on the lame super power list, and would probably be just below Meg’s extendable fingernails, which were featured in that episode of Family Guy where the family got superpowers.

The first part of the movie sets up some of the characters who live in the apartment, and some how they’re even more boring and flat than the characters from the first movie. Just like with the first film, I found none of the characters made any major impression on me, and I probably would never remember their names if I’ve saw this movie another twelve times. Then there’s the car full of punk rockers… I’m still trying to figure out what their purpose in the movie was. We see them in a couple of scenes arguing with each other a bit. We also find out that the lead punk rocker is the ex boyfriend of one of the girl’s in the building. By the time they arrive at the building, they get into a car accident with the parents of the child who has become a demon. These characters do nothing to aid the plot, which begs the question of why they’re in the movie at all.

The makeup effects are a big let down in Demons 2. We get the same demon teeth effect we got from the first movie, so that’s nothing new. The demon’s cool glowing eyes return, but for some reason the demons are also green now. There were moments where I wasn’t sure if I had demons on my TV screen or a pack of pissed off leprechauns. Then there’s the child demon… I give credit to Bava for having a child character get infected, but the effects used are goofy at best. Like in the first movie, some people infected with demons will shed their human skins and become full fledge demons. This happens to the child demon, but the special effects are lacking. The full fledge child demon looks and acts like a poor man’s gremlin. I know that the special effects in 1986 were not as advanced as today, but I think the scenes with the child demon would have been a lot better if they just used the child actor in his demon makeup.