‘Demons 2’ (1986) -  Lamberto Bava.

Italian Horror icon, Lamberto Bava’s grisly ‘Demons’ rigorously revivified horror in the mid-80s no less emphatically than fellow movie maestro, Stuart Gordon’s ’Re-Animator’, so a splattery sequel was inevitable. Just like AC/DC, you have to create something ostensibly new to appease loyal fans, but resolutely keeping the winning formula intoxicatingly undiluted. Audaciously, the prodigiously talented, Lamberto Bava not only successfully maintains the hyperbolic hysteria that abounded so phantasmagorically in the original, Bava miraculously ups the day-glow demented ante! The spectacularly slime-slathered, skin-shredding sequel is an outrageously gruesome, pyrotechnically perverse explosion of deliriously demonized death dealing that should satisfy the hardiest of splatter mad hatters!!   

In an austere, Ballardian, seemingly impregnable Tower Block a broad demographic of characters have their upwardly mobile lives diabolically descended into brutal, carotid-shredding torment by the Videodrome-esque return of exquisitely evil, permanently pus-seeping, razor-toothed, gut-guzzling demons! The innocent-looking birthday party for pretty protagonist, Sally Day (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni), a singularly overwrought young lady, is to be ghoulish ground zero for the feral flesh-filleting, bravura body-melting carnage that gorily ensues after her polite soirée is impolitely crashed by a maniacal, plague-bearing fiend! Once this eldritch contagion spreads rapidly throughout the demon-besieged building, Demons 2 unleashes a fantastically gory display of deliciously demented deviltry that no horror fan should miss.

‘Demons 2’ (1986) remains a Jawsome 80s horror blockbuster. The production values are exemplary, the garish, neon-splashed aesthetic and gruesomely realized creatures make for horrific-looking hell-raisers. No one watches lurid Italian horror films for the nuanced acting, I shall therefore bestow deserved, Neon-hued praise upon the many innovatively shriek-inducing, plasma-soaked set pieces. The sepulchral, Gothrock-enshrouded score works remarkably well and the uproariously welcome return of the eternally bellicose, magisterially moustachioed, sleek-headed figure of cult demon-killer, Bobby Rhodes was a marvel to behold once more!  

‘Demons 2 delivers a fantastically gory, doomily claustrophobic, pyrotechnical display of demented deviltry that any serious fan of gruesome apocalyptic 80s horror could have wished for!’ - Weirdlingwolf.