Saturday, April 04, 2009

Demon Queen – review

coverDirector: 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?’

1st victimAs 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.

a victim - neat effect but text unrelatedJesse (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).

dream sequenceWendy 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.

he is a zombie, mayhapsThe 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.

bad effectLucinda 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.

rotted down zombie thangShe 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.

3 comments:

Bill Dan Courtney said...

Cool. What software did you use to to rip this from your DVD?

Have your read that Google video will cease accepting uploads soon? I wonder if this will also affect their Blogger options?

Lately Youtube has been blocked again in China over some Tibet videos. I really am not that concerned about Tibet, but I am concerned about monster movie videos!!! I can of course see it and upload (slowly) via some proxy software I have but that is simply a hassle. I always worry Blogger will get blocked again :(

Great montage.

Bill

Bill Dan Courtney said...

Haha, sorry, that comment was actually meant for Chick Young. So you may be wondering what the hell I meant. I had the comment window open for both of you.

My comment to you was supposed to be about how people today, much younger people than I, may feel the quality of films that go straight to DVD is poor but they never lived through the years when the early camcorder to tape movies appeared. My God they were atrocious. I remember seeing a few and wondering if it was even legal to release material of such crappy quality. I have seen a few films (tapes) that looked worse than this one.

Taliesin_ttlg said...

Bill, no problemo...

and you're right, whether it was DVD or VHS the camcorder and digi-cam had a lot to answer for. Film stock always carried a cost that precluded some (but not all) of the very worst excesses...

Some of those very early ones really were bad, as you mention. The problem today, of course, is the magnitude of crappy digi-cam straight to DVD films... its just too easy!