Demons - Triple Feature (1980)

BLACK DEMONS: Italian director Umberto Lenzi returns to his roots with this zombie film, a comparatively restrained effort when compared with earlier films like EATEN ALIVE. In it, three American students, Kevin, Jessica, and Dick, travel to Rio where Dick takes part in a voodoo ritual that changes him forever. After the ritual, Dick finds himself waking the dead and even trying to kill his friends, who now have to contend with a horde of flesh-hungry black zombies. As in NIGHTMARE CITY, director Lenzi goes for genuine horror here instead of camp, and the result is a truly creepy and imaginatively gory movie.THE OGRE: Virginia Bryant stars in this Lamberto Bava shocker as Cheryl, a young woman still plagued by childhood nightmares about a vicious ogre. Now a famous horror novelist, Cheryl has decided to travel with her family to a country villa to relax and begin work on her new book. However, when she arrives, Cheryl finds that the villa's castle seems to be an exact replica of the one inhabited by the ogre in her childhood nightmares. Cheryl's worst fears seem to be realized when some of the villa's vacationers go missing, prompting her to suspect an ogre really does haunt the castle.THE OTHER HELL: This slice of Italian nunsploitation stars Franca Stoppi as Mother Vincenzia, the head of a convent of nuns where a number of bizarre murders have occurred. When it becomes obvious that a number of the convent's sisters are deranged and seemingly possessed by the devil, a priest, Father Valerio, tries to intercede before the nuns succeed in carrying out whatever evil mission they seem intent on fulfilling. Directed by Bruno Mattei, one of Italy's most notorious exploitation auteurs, THE OTHER HELL is gory and bizarre, and manages a number of moments of surreal looniness that will certainly endear it to fans of the genre.