Though not as complicated as the ridiculously tortured as the Zombi series (see the end of the Zombi 2/Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) review for more on that) the Demons series certainly has more than a few oddities of its own. Begun in 1985 with Lambert Bava’s Dèmoni/Demons, it continued with Dèmoni 2/Demons 2, again by Bava, two years later. Producer Dario Argento planned a third film, Dèmoni 3 but that morphed into La chiesa/The Church (1989) when director Michele Soavi rewrote the original script to distant it from the first two films. The title Demons 3 was then inherited by Bava when his La casa dell’orco (1989), an episode of the Brivido giallo series of feature length television films, was released overseas as Demons III: The Ogre.

But then, to throw a spanner in the works, Umberto Lenzi’s Black Demons – the director’s last horror film – was also released as Dèmoni 3 on video, much to Lenzi’s annoyance as he disliked the title. Soavi’s subsequent La setta/The Sect (1991) was also released in some territories as Demons 4, Bava’s 1990 remake of his father’s La maschera del demonio/Black Sunday/Mask of Satan (1960) saw the light of day as Demons 5, Luigi Cozzi’s Il gatto nero/The Black Cat (1989) surfaced in various places as Demons 6: Armageddon, Demons 6: De Profundis or just plain old Demons 6 and in Japan, Soavi’s Dellamorte Dellamore/Cemetery Man (1994) was known as Demons ’95.

There was much about Black Demons that annoyed its director. He felt that it had potential but that it was let down by a cast that he described as “put together somewhat haphazardly” in a video interview included on the DVD release, dismissing most of them (he liked Joe Balogh it seems) as “mediocre actors.” And the certainly the film is a long way from Lenzi at his best which was arguably when he was working on his string of gialli and poliziotteschi in the 1970s.

Despite the title, Black Demons is more of a zombie film than anything to do with demons. It was Lenzi’s only proper zombie in fact – Incubo sulla città contaminate/Nightmare City (1980) doesn’t count as, contrary to what many still seem to think, it doesn’t feature zombies at all, but people driven to acts of violence by radiation poisoning. American students Dick (Balogh) and his sister Jessica (Sonia Curtis) are travelling through Brazil with Jessica’s English boyfriend Kevin (Keith Van Hoven) when the moody and unpredictable Dick wanders off and finds himself taking part in a macumba ritual. Sometime later, the group leave Rio and their jeep breaks down near a remote plantation in the jungle where they team up with a pair of hikers, Jose (Philip Murray) and Sonia (Juliana Teixeira). They learn that it was the site of a slave rebellion a hundred years before. Playing back a recording he made of the voodoo ritual, Dick causes the zombies of six executed slaves (Felix Lorival, Paul R. Goodman, Tony Martins, Gleis J. Pereira, Sergio Costa and Louis Karlson) to rise from their graves and go on a murderous rampage.

The cast really are a very bland and undistinguished lot. Lenzi was particularly scathing about American actress Sonia Curtis who replaced his original choice at the last minute – “I did not like her,” he said before making some disparaging remarks about her appearance. He was also less than enamoured of Van Hoven and the local cast, but as noted liked Balogh (he’d worked with Lenzi before on Paura nel buio/Hitcher in the Dark (1989)) though in truth he’s no less bland than the rest of them.

Which is a shame because get past the non-performances and Black Demons isn’t as awful as you might have been led to believe. The zombies are a fairly impressive looking lot, Lenzi and Olga Pehar’s story and script are pretty good (a bit more development of the idea of the black slaves rising up against white oppression would have helped) and the gore (courtesy of Serge Farjala) may not be the best but it’s good enough to keep the gore hounds happy (there’s plenty of eyeball violence with hooks). But the performances really are terrible and conspire to undo whatever else good is going on the film.

There are moments that either drag (the voodoo ceremony, supposedly a record of an actual ritual, tends to drag on a bit) and things that don’t make a great deal of sense (why was one of the zombies buried with a noose around his neck? And the zombies have to kill six white people but there are only five available) but Lenzi and his director of photography Maurizio Dell’Orco have a solid eye for an atmospheric shot – the zombies emerging from their graves is a particularly atmospheric sequence. It’s not a great film but it’s a better one that one might have been led to believe. Lenzi was very proud of it at least, at least in part: “I am not completely satisfied with it… even though I really liked the story. If we had a stellar cast such as that of Seven Bloodstained Orchids or of other films, or of Spasmo, it would have been a very beautiful film.”