Fulci will never do a bad movie as far as I am concerned. He earned that much credit with Zombie and The Beyond.

Now that I've gotten that is out of the way....

PLOT: A group of Canadian archeologists are in Sicily for a dig at the site of some ancient churches. Hilarity ensues.

REVIEW: One of the archeologists, Liza, starts having nightmares about nuns and crucifixions and events of the distant past. Oddly enough, these are the same visions she got back in Canada when she took part in a seance just before leaving for Sicily.

Liza soon finds herself wandering away from the archeologist's camp and ends up in the conveniently accessible mausoleum of the church from her dreams. She chooses a wall adorned with a mural of one of the nuns from her vision and starts hammering away with her little pick. The wall caves in and Liza finds a descending stairway hidden behind the thin plaster. And, of course, she goes down to investigate. Alone. By herself. With nobody else.

This is when things begin to happen. We soon see the first appearance of the "crazy evil ghost nuns". Liza goes crazy. People get killed. Liza is still crazy, but she gets possessed on top if it

All the while, the townspeople seem to know exactly what is going on. Even the lowly butcher knew they should have gotten rid of the Canadians.

There were a lot of cliched plot devices and some over the top acting in Demonia. But, that can be said of almost any genre movie. The cinematography was all over the map. Sometimes the colors were crisp and the picture was vibrant, at other times the images were fuzzy and washed out.

The locations were beautiful. Even the meat locker at the butcher shop was a good location. There wasn't as much meat as I thought there'd be in a butcher's freezer... but I guess there is only so much room in the Italian gore films budget. I liked the Library location as well, but old dusty libraries are always good in horror movies. The library scene in particular had a kind of claustrophobic creepy feel to it.

Unfortunately, we never really got a good look at the "crazy evil ghost nuns" going about the job of killing and murder. There was, however a good sequence of the "crazy evil nuns" back before they got corpsed by angry villagers. I commented while watching the flashback scene: "Hey look, there is a priest loose in the nunnery..."

The story was hard to follow at times, especially at the end. There also seemed to be pieces of the film missing. There were inexplicable jumps in story and timeline that I couldn't quite account for when I re-watched the film.

The highlights of this film were definitely the death scenes. 15th century nuns seem to have a knack for knocking off archeologists in new and interesting ways. I won't go in to the methods and ruin the movie, but I am still curious to know how a 15th century "crazy evil ghost nun" learned how to fire a harpoon gun.

This movie is not one of Fulci's best, but there is plenty of material to keep fans entertained. There was not much nudity, nor was there any award winning dialog... but there was gore. Every Fulci movie has some innovatively gruesome death scene that the previous one didn't.

This movie had all the earmarks of a genre classic -- sex, sacrilege, murder, decapitation, infanticide... angry cats....

Demonia would be a welcome addition to any fan's collection. I don't know if I will be going back to watch the entire movie again any time soon, but I will definitely revisit some of the goriest scenes when friends come over for movie night.