Demonoid: Messenger of Death

Behold! The poster art promised pure, molten heavy-metal hell—a horned warrior, sword raised to the void, a shrieking cosmic face frozen in eternal terror. It looked like a lost Manowar album, or the forbidden sketch on the back of a high school notebook, drawn by a kid who carved pentagrams into his desk with a compass.

And what did we actually get? Crawling hands, gambling addictions, a blowtorched priest, and Samantha Eggar wondering why she didn’t just stick with The Brood. The artwork screams apocalypse—what you actually get is a satanic hand puppet show.

But that’s the beauty of it. The Demonoid poster is a lie—and the lie is glorious. It whispers, “Rent me. You’ll regret it.” And you will. With a smile.

But I should explain.

Demonoid: Messenger of Death is a pitifully bad, albeit very entertaining, Mexican horror flick (I think) set in Mexico, and starring those most photogenic of all horror extras, the famed Mummies of Guanajuato. These pesky corpses from a long, long time ago, due to some strange factor of the soil perhaps, refused to decay properly and instead—much like the bodies on display in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Sicily—are rather horrifying reminders to anyone who sees them of the brief, impermanent, transitory nature of human existence. (The mummies had a bit role in Herzog's Nosferatu, but got a small segment all their own in the original all-death shockumentary Faces of Death (1978).)

Samantha Eggar, who was in David Cronenberg's The Brood, was in a lot of great films during her acting career. Demonoid, however, was not one of them. We start out with hooded Satanic cultists killing a woman and cutting her hand off, if I remember correctly (I had trouble getting my attention span to comply with this flick). Then we go to modern times, and Samantha Eggar and her husband (I think) are part of an archaeological dig—or maybe operating a mine or something—and they discover some relics and a ritual sacrificial chamber with a kind of statue of a Baphomet goat. After that, all Hell breaks loose.

We have a repeat shot, flashed in front of us, of a demon from some bad heavy metal video of the era, a total cheesecore image of the infernal Demonoid holding aloft a sword, horns resplendent, standing in some smoke-filled void. It gets repeated again and again here, like a lightning flash from Heaven to Hell. It may be one of the few cool things in the film.

So the husband gets possessed, and becomes a compulsive gambler, winning every game. Some crook-noses kidnap him, but it doesn't go well, and he tries to cut off his possessed hand before pouring gasoline over his head in a scene that verges on comic. I mean, like Evil Dead 2 comic. Was this meant as self-parody?

Whether it was or not, Addams Family hands go crawling around all over this flick. It's kind of cool but, at the same time, kind of dumb. Next we have a Black dude who is a boxer or cop or something, and his hand gets possessed too. But, as Christ commanded, "If thy right hand offend thee..." You know the rest.

We then get a priest who was hijacked from The Omen, and we get a really cool scene where his impaled hand is burned off by a blowtorch. Nobody in this damn film has any nerve endings, it seems.

I first saw Demonoid in an old-fashioned video rental shop, and the completely hokey but otherwise very fetching heavy metal fantasy art compelled me. It was like the VHS box equivalent of an old Ozzy Osbourne album cover (or maybe Dio, or even Manowar). It was that Demonoid holding his sword, and a terror-stricken horror movie actress. The whole thing just screamed Night Train to Terror-level awfulness, puke-inducing cinematic gouda of a most nauseating, 1983 flavor. Such films are often headache-inducing or even slightly nauseating. They make little sense, have nothing within their ninety-odd minutes anyone can possibly take seriously, and exist mainly for yucks—so we can play Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Home Game while stoned out of our minds on junk food and cannabis (not that I personally know about such things. I'm as straight-edge as they come, G).

Demonoid is the most fun you'll have watching an otherwise wretched, worthless, half-assed fear flick. And if you don't believe me, well—talk to the hand.

Demonoid: Messenger of Death (Alfredo Zacarias, 1981)

My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1

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