Review for Demons Rising

Introduction

I'm not what you would call a horror fan, although I do enjoy the occasional scare. It's fairer to say that I don't go looking for horror movies, and I don't have the in-depth knowledge and appreciation of the art form to consistently and fairly judge such films. Besides, what I have seen of the conveyor belt Hollywood horror output has often put me off the whole thing. So when Demons Rising fell onto my doormat, one of those rare unsolicited review discs that still on occasion passes my way, I was tempted to pass on it. It was the blurb that caught my eye, and some unexpectedly positive comments on the IMDB. The first thing is that it is a low budget independent film, and the second thing is that the plot is anything but a traditional Hollywood shocker. It's more a mix of a dozen different genres and ideas, an action, horror, splatter, kung fu, sci-fi, comedy thriller. It looks breathtakingly ambitious, and I've found with such low budget independent features, that if they even succeed at 10% of what they attempt, the results are worth watching. Besides, over the past few years, I've become acquainted in passing with the Japanese low budget indie splatter movie scene, and if Demons Rising can deliver the same sort of spectacle as Hard Revenge Milly, or Aliens vs. Ninja, we could be onto a winner here.


The Liber Malorum, the so-called book of life and death is a heretical text with mystical powers. It turns those who read it into demons, and has the power to raise the dead as zombies. It's rumoured that the great dictators of the past, Hitler, and Genghis Khan among others possessed it at one time, and that their downfall only came when the book fell from their possession. Now that it has resurfaced in Italy, a man named Montorio wants its power. He hires a professional thief, Kyle Rush to recover it, but then double crosses him, killing his partner. Now Kyle wants revenge, and he's soon putting together a team to do just that. Meanwhile, the book falls into the hands of Matthias Locke, a former government agent turned Buddhist priest. He's trying to escape his former life, and follow the pacifist way. But seeing the book's power, and realising that whosoever possesses it, no matter what their initial intentions, will turn to evil, he realises that Buddha has given him a different path, one that leads him to team up with Kyle. But now Montorio wants his book back, and he has the undead demonic operatives to get it for him. The CIA wants it as well, and everyone is stabbing each other in the back to get it, and all the while, the dead keep rising, and so do the demons.

The Disc

Demons Rising gets a barebones disc to showcase it. The 4:3 regular transfer adequately puts across the image, a digitally shot film that is clear and sharp for the most part, put together well, but betraying its low budget origins when it comes to the production design and the effects. It feels very much like a homemade feature, and has a charm and attraction because of that. The audio is simple DD 2.0 English, and the greatest issue is that the environment or worse the music drowns out the dialogue in the majority of scenes. The disc presents the film with a simple static menu, offering scene select or play movie options.

Conclusion

Demons Rising isn't that winner that I was hoping for. It is what it appears to be, a low budget action horror flick, and a charming if ultimately disappointing piece of independent cinema. It is very much a labour of love, and probably made on the kind of budget that wouldn't even provide catering for a Hollywood movie. So the film looks cheap, the effects are sub par, the acting is variable, but never great, the music synthetic, the story promising, but poorly executed, and the dialogue on occasion made my teeth itch. In short, it's typical for a low budget film, especially one whose reach exceeds its grasp by such a long way.


It does have a sense of fun to it though, the ideas it has are appealing, and you can see this story snaffled up, sanitised, and homogenised by Hollywood. The raw crudity and improvisational approach to the filmmaking is actually a little more engaging to me. The characters certainly have their moments of appeal, and there are choice bits of dialogue, interplay and action that can catch the attention. This is also a film that does quite a lot in terms of stunts and action, certainly exceeding what you would expect on its budget, even though some of the fight scenes do get a little repetitious with their punches and kicks.


Everything that is wrong with this film comes down to budget as you would expect, and simply throwing money at the problems would probably result in those Hollywood flicks I so despise. I would have preferred it to be widescreen certainly, a little more quality with the special effects wouldn't hurt, a larger foley library to draw on (when you hear the same gunshot, and the same fight impact sound a hundred times in a film, it begins to grate), better actors, or more rehearsal, or more time… Once you start you can't stop, and you lose that independent charm.


If I were to invest a little more time and money, I'd put the time into polishing the script. While some of the dialogue catches the attention, most of it plays as cheesy and clichéd, and a little work could have sorted that. More importantly, the film needs to be half an hour shorter. There's a lot of running around, a to b antics, which means that the overall plot suffers as a result. The threat of the Liber Malorum never quite feels real or important enough in the film, and defining that as the focus more vividly would have helped. Money I would throw at the film's audio. Far too often the dialogue was lost under the film's music, or beneath ambient noise. I just couldn't hear what the actors were saying. A better boom mike would have helped, but far more useful would have been time spent on ADR, looping lost lines in a recording studio. Hopefully this film serves as a learning tool for the next time around, as there is certainly enough promise in this film to warrant seeing more from its creators.