The Demons series is a complex one, all entries after the second film having nothing to do with Lamberto Bava's first two movies. The majority of the series consists of unrelated films that have been slapped with a Demons alternative title in certain countries: Michele Soavi's The Church (Demons 3 in Japan), The Sect (Demons 4 in Japan) and Cemetery Man (Demons '95 in Japan), Luigi Cozzi's The Black Cat (Demons 6 in France and Japan) and Lucio Fulci's Demonia (New Demons in Japan).
Black Demons, directed by Umberto Lenzi, is another contender for the Demons 3 title (the others being the aforementioned The Church, and the made for TV movie Demons 3: The Ogre, which was directed by Lamberto Bava but which shares nothing in common with Demons 1 and 2).
Coming from the director who kick-started the Italian cannibal craze (with Man from Deep River) and who gave us one of the most extreme example of the genre (Cannibal Ferox), it's no surprise that Black Demons delivers several gruesome scenes to delight gorehounds, but the bloodletting is sporadic and doesn't begin until quite a way into the film, so patience is required while Lenzi sets the scene...
Three students - Kevin (Keith Van Hoven), his girlfriend Jessie (Sonia Curtis) and her half-brother Dick (Joe Balogh) - are in Rio de Janeiro, where Dick witnesses a macumba ritual. While driving to another location, the trio's jeep breaks down and they are forced to take refuge at a remote Brazilian plantation, home to young couple Sonia (Juliana Teixeira) and Jose (Philip Murray) and their housemaid Maria (Maria Alves). When Dick plays the recording that he made of the voodoo ceremony, he becomes possessed, and resurrects the bodies of six murdered slaves, who crawl from their graves looking for revenge.
So, essentially, Black Demons is a zombie movie, with the undead picking up a variety of sharp tools with which to kill their victims: Sonia unwisely wanders out into the night (wearing white t-shirt and knickers) and gets her eye gouged out with a hook; Maria also gets her eye gouged out, and has an axe planted in her skull before being hung for good measure. Jose also meets a grisly fate, but he is stabbed in the neck by the possessed Dick.
With a combination of abysmal acting and uninspired direction by Lenzi, Black Demons is not a good film, the only real attractions being the gore and a few moments that are unintentionally funny: a zombie lurking behind Kevin, with knife in hand, is hilarious, as is the scene where the undead suddenly pop up into frame, and the ending, in which Kevin launches Molotov cocktails at the zombies, is completely inept, the bottles of fuel exploding like bombs.
3.5/10, rounded up to 4 for IMDb.
