Whenever Hammer offered 'different' - 'Never Take Sweets From A Stranger', 'These Are The Damned', this one . . the response was mostly muted. 'Stay in your lane!' cried critics and public. 'Stay in your foggy Edwardian cemeteries, your dank asylums, your Home Counties-locked pirate ships . .'
'Demons . .' fits this line. Category is: 'slightly arty psychological melodrama' with all-in scene-chewing and shouting.
It is the morbid tale of . .
Oh, whatever. It'd take all morning . .
Let's review the cast instead. The weird, bemused cast:
My old mate, Michael Hordern, is most fun. A mad clergyman wandering the woods rambling and tut-tutting to himself as he goes.
Robert Hardy, overboard - to say the least - is in the lead as batty and torn Baron Zorn.
Yvonne Mitchell - a fine, unnerving actress; the relentless 'Yield To The Night' etc - is 'Aunt Hilda'(!), a kind of psycho-nanny to Zorn's insane/possessed/neither children.
Patrick Magee, a discredited quack, brought in to . . well . . make everything worse !
Paul Jones - yes, him - a Lennonesque hero who hasn't a scooby what the lines he's delivering mean or where he is.
Kenneth J Warren, a skinhead Aussie with a glut of ranting loon roles behind him, is almost subdued amongst this lot as the brutal butler. Almost . .
This hardcore ensemble is chiefly why 'Demons..' doesn't get a kicking. Add realistic gore; typically fine Harry Robinson music; the great Arthur Grant's last Hammer camerawork . . you've a sympathetic pot.
Despite it's pretensions, don't expect to take anything from - or make anything of - it, either. It's entirely designed to be senses-bustingly fevered. I accuse the miasmic coiling of the previous years' 'The Devils' as guilty - but then, blame 'The Devils' for everything from 'Flavia The Heretic' to 'Caligula'.
