Brett Halsey plays Professor Paul Evans, an archeologist leading an excavation in Sicily. Liza Harris (Meg Register), one of his colleagues on the dig, becomes obsessed with the chambers underneath a church on the mountain overlooking the village where the team is working. It was site of a massacre committed by the local townspeople of nuns who had supposedly become servants of evil. The deeper into the mystery surrounding the events that Liza digs, the more she becomes possessed by one of the nuns. Meanwhile, any locals who help with the excavation, and the archeologists themselves, become the victims of horrific and bloody murders committed by supernatural forces.

Even though director Lucio Fulci could no longer inspire producers to give him the budgets he’d been used to over the years, he still loved to work and it shows with Demonia (1990). Luckily, cinematographer Luigi Ciccarese was well versed in shooting horror films at this point such as Zombie 4: After Death (1989) and Aenigma (1987). More importantly, he knows how to capture the incredibly beautiful Sicilian locations in the film. Composer Giovanni Cristiani’s percussion driven score is super frickin’ cool and I wish he’d done more work in the genre. Strangely enough, parts of his score remind me of the Manuel De Sica’s music for Cemetery Man (1994).

I really love Meg Register’s performance as Liza. She is freakin’ intense! Any actress who sticks her finger in a light socket before every scene (presumably) is going the extra mile in my book. Fulci regular Al Cliver has a brief role where he wears a cardigan before getting brutally murdered. Is that a spoiler? Oh, I’m sorry! Did you really think Al was gonna live to the end of a Fulci film? Brett Halsey, Fulci’s leading man in The Devi’s Honey (1986) and Touch of Death (1988), is amazing, as usual. My favorite part of his performance in Demonia are his looks of disgust at the nightly drunken behavior of his archeology team.

I’m guilty of badmouthing this movie over the years and it wasn’t because of the old DVD, which was fine for the time. No, I was just an impatient gorehound, riding off the high of Fulci’s golden era and hadn’t checked my expectations at the door. It would be years before I would get into revisiting late 80s/early 90s Italian horror that I’d once spurned and Demonia was on that list. Luckily, Severin made my revisit even sweeter by dropping this Blu-ray on the world. Now folks can enjoy this trashy and brutally violent film in HD. While it’s true that the pacing does drag a bit when the cops investigating the murders show up but stick with this one, Demonia is a damn fine Fulci film.

I can’t get over how great Demonia looks and sounds on this Severin disc. I can finally retire my old Shriek Show DVD because this just blows it out of the water. Honestly, I’m just floored by how frickin’ awesome this Blu-ray looks. Am I gushing or just gushing blood? Who can tell? The film is presented in both its English dub and Italian with English subtitles.

The inimitable Stephen Thrower, author of Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci, provides an insightful and fact filled commentary track. There’s an interview with camera operator Alessandro Grossi, who worked with Fulci on Voices from Beyond (1991), The House of Clocks (1989), and The Sweet House of Horrors (1989) shares some reminisces of working with the man. Screenwriter Antonio Tentori (who is uncredited but worked on Demonia) also has some excellent stories to share about Fulci. And we get to hear from the man himself as this disc features VHS footage of the director on the set of Demonia. There’s also a trailer for Demonia on the disc.

Director – Lucio Fulci
Cast – Brett Halsey, Meg Register, Al Cliver, Lino Salemme
Country of Origin – Italy
Reviewer – Richard Glenn Schmidt