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APRIL 27 VHS MOVIE REVIEW : DEMONOID (1981)
Mexican-made horror film with an international cast. The film opens with a woman stealing a severed hand out of a silver case (which is shaped like a hand) in a cave occupied by a religious sect dressed like the Ku Klux Klan (only with yellow hoods and robes). The woman becomes instantly possessed and gains superhuman powers in her left hand, but is overpowered by members of the sect, who chain her now-topless body to a cave wall and chop-off her left hand with an axe (nothing is left to the imagination). The hand tries escape on its own, but a sect member stabs it with a knife and puts it in the silver case, waiting patiently for the next person to open it and become possessed. We then switch to the present day, where Jennifer Barnes (Samantha Eggar; CURTAINS - 1982) arrives in Guanajuato, Mexico to spend some time with her husband Mark (Roy Jensen; NIGHTMARE HONEYMOON - 1973; here billed as "Roy Cameron Jenson"), an investor in a silver mine. Jennifer enters the mine by herself (in high heels and an evening dress, but she still has enough sense to wear a hardhat!) and accidentally disturbs some rocks, exposing a rotting corpse missing its left hand (the woman from the beginning, perhaps?) and a huge chunk of silver (Which begs the question: How did Jennifer discover this so easily in an area the miners walk through on a daily basis?). Pepe (Jose Chavez Trowe), Mark's right-hand man (no pun intended), tells Mark and Jennifer that the mine is cursed with the "Devil's Hand", a centuries-old legend, and now that she has exposed the one-handed corpse, none of the superstitious locals will enter the mine and do their jobs. Jennifer hopes to shame the locals into going back to work by traveling down to the deepest part of the mine with just her husband and make they it there after several close calls (A human skull falls into Jennifer's hands and Mark jokingly says, "What, are you collecting those?"). Mark falls through a sand pit into a lower chamber that contains a sacrificial temple to the demon with only one hand. After Jennifer joins him in the chamber, they find the silver hand case and bring it topside. All hell breaks loose after that. Mark shows the case to the workers and they all run away in fear. That night, a drunk and distraught Mark opens the case and discovers nothing but ash inside. He goes to sleep, but the ash transforms into a crawling hand that tries to attack Jennifer. Mark grabs the Devil's Hand and becomes instantly possessed; his left hand has a mind of its own and it's up to no good. The next morning, Mark forces all the mineworkers back into the mine and blows it up with dynamite, killing everyone. Mark escapes to the Sands Casino in Las Vegas, where his possessed left hand makes him a big winner at the craps table, but he is knocked out in the parking lot by hustlers Frankie (Ted White) and Angela (Russ Meyer regular Haji, billed here as "Haji Catton") and driven to a shack in the desert, where he is tied to a table and questioned about his "system" for winning. Mark breaks free and kills them both and, in a moment of clarity, douses himself in gasoline and sets himself on fire, but the left hand buries itself in the sand to avoid being burned. Mark's body is claimed by Father Cunningham (Stuart Whitman; NIGHT OF THE LEPUS - 1972) and buried in Los Angeles (Why he claims Mark's body is never fully explained, but it does move the action to L.A.). Jennifer is convinced that her husband is still possessed and not technically dead, so she goes to Los Angeles, where the burnt corpse of Mark rises from the grave, severs his left hand in the door of a police car and possesses the body of Sgt. Leo Matson (Lew Saunders), a cop friend of Father Cunningham. Can the good Father and Jennifer get the hand back in the silver case before more people get the nickname "Lefty"? Silly beyond belief, DEMONOID (subtitled "MESSENGER OF DEATH!" on the advertising materials, but not on the actual prints) is mindless entertainment, which defies all normal logic. Director Alfredo Zacharias (THE BEES - 1978; CRIME OF CRIMES - 1989), who co-wrote the mind-numbing screenplay with David Lee Fein and F. Amos Powell, has made an unintentionally hilarious supernatural chiller, as he tries to show how many different ways people can sever their left hand from their bodies. Besides the axe and car door dismemberments, there's removal by laser at a doctor's office, getting run over by a train, cut off by car windshield during an auto accident and removal by blowtorch. There's not much more to the story than that, as the possessed hand passes from body-to-body. Samantha Eggar knows fully well that she picked a stinker to star in, so she plays her role so earnestly, she becomes a parody of herself (especially during the "What The Fuck?!?" finale). Toss in a loony car chase, subliminal demon imagery (like Pazuzu in THE EXORCIST - 1973), a few scenes of gore, dismembered hand puppetry and a bit of female nudity and what you get is a film best viewed under the influence. What that influence is depends on your preference. Robert A. Burns (TOURIST TRAP - 1978) handled the Special Effects Art Direction. Also starring Narciso Busquets, Erika Carlsson, George Soviak and Al Jones. Available on VHS by Media Home Entertainment with a budget VHS release by Video Treasures a few years later. Not available on DVD. Rated R. { text from critcononline.com }
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