Starring Gregory Lee Kenyon, Venesa Talor, Brannon Gould, Kyle Tracy, Jennifer Capo, Allen Nabors, Candace Kroslak, Dominic Joseph, Val Perez, Todd Rex
Directed by Jay Woelfel
Expectations: Low. Look at that cover art and tell me you’d expect anything more.
On the general scale:
On the B-Movie scale:
Demonicus has many things working against it: it’s shot on video, its script is definitely lacking, its characters are mere cutouts of real people, its budget is noticeably small. Despite these things that could easily be deal breakers, Demonicus is ridiculously entertaining, as well as having the distinction of being pretty much the only traditional slasher in the Full Moon catalog. The film opens with a nice selection of mountain vistas. This is supposed to be the Italian Alps, and while you might fool a country boy from Iowa, I instantly recognized them as the Angeles National Forest just north of Los Angeles. You don’t grow up around them for over 25 years and not notice that stuff. Anyway, besides my brain killing their illusions, the filmmakers actually do a good job of selling these mountains as somewhere other than California, as there’s snow on the ground in patches and the shot selection is careful enough to not make it too obvious.
But enough digressions about the mountains, let’s get to the story. James and his girlfriend are hiking around, doing their best to beat their friends to the campsite and win the challenge. James is ever the competition-minded dude, so he had everyone split up and start up the mountain at different spots to see who could make it to the campsite first. Of course, he wants to win so he’s pushing his city-loving girlfriend much too hard. She receives a welcome rest when James discovers a large cave, but I bet she didn’t expect her boyfriend to emerge from the mountain fully clothed in Roman armor and a demonic helmet. She probably also didn’t see that sword to the gut coming either.