Demon Queen – review

Director: Donald Farmer

Release date: 1986

Contains spoilers

This is one of the earlier camcorder, straight to VHS, rubbish vampire movies… ish… You see as well as having very little in the way of plot the so called demon queen of the title, Lucinda (Mary Farano), may not be a vampire – there is a touch of succubus, the title states demon and I was close to looking at this under ‘Vamp or Not?’

As it was I decided it probably should be straight to review and we start off with Lucinda and a man in a cheap hotel room. They kiss and then we cut to a post coital scene. Lucinda rips out his heart and then proceeds to rub it over her breasts before eating it. We can note that he says he was drawn to her but that really is close to the maximum of lore we get directly given in this.

Jesse (Dennis Stewart) is a drug dealer who is approached by the diminutive Izzie (Ric Foster), along with Izzie’s henchman Bone (Cliff Dance). Seems there was a deal gone bad and Jesse owes Izzie $6K. As he only has $23 on him Bone is told to teach him a lesson. Jesse is out cold when Lucinda appears, grabs Bone and rips his throat out. She is after a place to stay and Jesse, when he comes round, says that she can stay with him and his wired girlfriend Wendy (Patti Valliere).

Wendy isn’t happy and Jesse starts having strange dreams about Lucinda, seeing her cloaked, having her feed him blood from her breast and ripping his heart out. Seriously though the dream sequence goes on and on for around 1/8th of the films short running time. Then again there wasn’t any story really, so I guess it was a case of putting something in the film.

The film pads itself out by having attacks either by Lucinda or by the zombies that her victims seem to turn into. Some of the zombies shamble and others can actually still talk, so if they are actually meant to be zombies, well I wasn’t 100% sure. They further stretch out the film by having scenes in a video store that were perhaps meant to be deconstructionist but were in fact badly acted and boring.

Lucinda ends up killing Wendy for Jesse but the film has made the cardinal mistakes of not really having a plot and, worse, not having a motivation for anything the characters do. Why does Lucinda kill Wendy for Jesse? Who knows but, worse, who actually cares? However she then reveals her true face to him (really bad effects time) and he runs off.

She then meets her sticky end by being attacked by one of her own created zombies, who is now fairly rotten and, I think, was meant to be Bone. With just enough time for a none-shocking shock at the end we have got through the ordeal that is the film. Seriously though, it really is bad, not worth seeking out, not even as a bad movie. 0.5 out of 10, with the slight amount of a mark for the fact that some of the blood effects are better than they should be.

The imdb page is here.