Directed by Jean Rollin
Starring- Joelle Coeur, Lieva Lone, Patricia Hermenier, John Rico
Jean Rollin is one of the most well known Eurohorror directors. He has a legion of fans from all over the world that love the beautiful, surreal quality of his films. i guess I should admit...I'm not one of those fans. While I do think his films are beautiful they seem a bit hollow and pointless to me. His near-fetishistic use of the same themes over and over wears thin for me. The beach, beautiful twin girls, clowns for God's sake...the man has issues. Having said all that I have to say that The Demoniacs is by far my favorite Rollin film. While all the themes mentioned above are present in it Rollin manages to keep it together and actually tell a mostly coherant story.
The story is about a group of thugs consisting of a captain, a psycho, a wimp, and a rather feral woman named Tina who specialize in using lights to lure ships into rocks. Once the ship sinks the loot the wreckage and kill any survivors. The gang is up to it's usual tricks one night and the only suriviors are 2 ethereally beautiful young girls who stagger on shore and are promptly raped and abused by the men while Tina strips and gyrates on some rocks. They leave the girls for dead and head off for the local pub to celebrate. The captain starts seeing visions of the girls and freaks out. Hints are dropped that if the girls find their way to some kinda ruins there will be a shitstorm of unspecified nature. Naturally the girls stumble into the ruins and meet a lady dressed as a clown and an old man who looked a bit like Rasputin. Apparently the devil or some equivelant lives in the ruins and the girls fuck him to seal a revenge pact. It's a pretty sorry excuse for a devil. He is way too friendly and dresses a bit like Tom Jones meets Vegas styled Elvis. The girls have one night to get their revenge and set out to do just that.
Some of the stuff set in the ruins comes dangerously close to the kind of overly arty type of nonsense that usually throws me into a coma but it never goes over the edge. The main thing that held my interest were interesting charecters. The teeth gnashing, sweat soaked captain...the wild and beautiful TIna...and the creepy yet sexy girls all stick in my memory. I would say this is a good starting place for people interested in checking out Rollin's work. One last quick note- the dvd I have is the Redemption release and is missing a scene. During the rape of the girl's on the beach TIna masterbates while dancing and gyrating. Clips of the scene are shown in the trailer included on the disc but the actual scene itself was left out.-Badfish
Rating-3 Brains |
