Le masque de Satan

Lamberto Bava decides being his own man isn't going to cut it and remakes one of his father's best known films, Black Sunday (1960). Because what was Mario Bava's film really in need of? Teen skiers! A group of 8 teens go skiing and fall into a huge hole after an earthquake. Once inside they discover a woman encased in ice wearing an iron mask. Naturally, they pull it off and it causes another earthquake with one of their friends being impaled by a huge ice shard (literally no one cares). The group of now 7 find the earthquake has unearthed some ancient city where a blind priest, who killed the witch centuries ago, lives with his dog. The kids soon start acting possessed and David and Sabina, the two virgins of the group, must fight to survive. This is Bava doing Black Sunday mixed with Demons (1985) to so-so effect. On the plus side, there is some good design work and cinematography. They also have some great snow in this. The downside? Pretty much everything else. Bava would have fared better just doing a teen horror flick rather than a weak attempt at the Nikolai Gogol story, which will only draw comparisons with his father's superior work. Look for Michele Soavi as one of the kids.

David's up against a demonic horde, and the only thing he can use to save himself is his virginity!

Eight skiers out on the Alps or some sh*t all manage to fall into a huge hole, where one of them, Sabina, breaks her leg. They discover a body down there with a mask attached and remove said mask, causing some of them to go crazy. After a demon wind blows into the cave, the remaining seven skiers (one, a pain in the arse called Sergio, is killed by an icicle) find a strange church under the snow, which leads to a small town where there's only one resident: A blind priest.

I forgot already: Sabina's leg is cured by this point. Everyone except David and Sabina starts acting like totalarseholes in the priest's house, taking the pish out the blind guy and causing him to look up some legend about Abinas, a witch who was burned and cursed everyone years before. Things from now on get increasingly strange and freaky.

The thing is, Sabina's still been acting normal by this point, but as her buddies (including a still young looking Michele Soavi, of every Italian film made in the eighties) are freaking out, pulling their teeth out and doing all that satanic stuff. Also, the only non-normal thing Sabina's trying to do is pop David's cherry, which she tries to do again and again until for some reason she turns into a rotten zombie/giant chicken.

After watching this one, Lamberto Bava's Graveyard Disturbance makes a lot more sense. He's going for freaky visuals and alternate realities here (and in that film), and to be honest, it works. This film is far from predictable. Hell, it's hard as hell to follow half the time. Characters are killed over and over and still come back (there's a nice shot of Sergio coming back in the middle of the film), some gargoyles come alive and there's the ever present wind blowing through everything and continuous snow.

That said, if you have half a brain and therefore some patience, you might find yourself getting tired of the constant attempts to get David to empty his pods. This film isn't scary, but it's nice and trippy and therefore I give it a thumbs up.

Haha! That's not a thumb - it's a demon penis. Fooled you!

No - it's not. It's a thumb that loves you. You said you'd never leave this thumb. Why leave?

Kidding! It's basically a demon penis! Fooled you! Haha! Phallus beef! Erzatz thumb!

No it's a thumb...sorry...

Haha! Demon tadger! Ahhh...

Basically the last few lines of this review are this film. Also - IMDb spell checked me for spelling arseholes wrong!

When I had rewatched the entire Luis Bunuel filmography in 2011, I opted to complement it by viewing movies directed by his son Juan Luis. I intended doing the same with Lamberto Bava's work on the occasion of the centenary marathon devoted to his father Mario; however, after checking out the title under review – which is actually a remake of the elder Bava's BLACK Sunday (1960) – I decided against it, given the utter disappointment the experience proved to be! Whether by accident or design, Lamberto was virtually Mario's age when he adapted the Nikolai Gogol story "The Vij" – but the latter already had a full 10 years' practice directing movies, whereas his Dad's effort had been his official debut; still, watching the two films back-to-back one would think the reverse was true…in view of the overall amateurishness of the 1989 version compared to the extreme confidence and dazzling artistry displayed throughout the 1960 one! For the record, I will be getting to yet another rendition (made on its homeground in 1967 and, by far, the most faithful) of the same source material…

A word on the title: the younger Bava is perhaps best-known for helming the gross and grossly overrated DEMONS (1985) and DEMONS 2 (1986); for some odd reason, a handful of unrelated contemporaneous Italian (and one American!) horror films were released in Japan as if they were subsequent entries in what could only be termed an unenviable franchise – namely Michele Soavi's THE CHURCH (1989; which became DEMONS 3) and THE SECT (1991; DEMONS 4…followed by Bava's effort despite that one being actually shot prior to it!), Luigi Cozzi's THE BLACK CAT (1989; DEMONS 6…ditto!), Freddie Francis' U.S.-made DARK TOWER (1989; DEMONS 7…and again!) and, once more, Soavi's CEMETERY MAN (1994; somehow retitled DEMONS '95)!! Truth be told, a couple of these are genuinely superior genre flicks but, while I have never watched the Francis movie (and, since it is readily available on "You Tube", I just took the plunge and acquired it!), Cozzi's and now Bava's own are certainly worthy of comparison with the official DEMONS pair – both in their similarly incoherent narrative and the absolutely dire end result!

Well, to go back to the matter at hand: in this version the diabolism-related events are updated to our times and re-set (not ineffectively) to an icy mountain landscape. BLACK Sunday had gotten off to a hell (pardon the pun) of a start depicting what was possibly the last word on the oft-used stake-burning of a female witch invoking a curse upon the descendants of her executioners; here, this sequence gets relegated to an unprovoked flashback and, needless to say, generates little of the impact that Bava Snr. imbued in that iconic set-piece in his film! Incidentally, too many horror flicks of the era put a number of annoying youths at their center: with respect to Italy, for instance, there were not only the DEMONS movies themselves but Bava Jr.'s own made-for-TV GRAVEYARD DISTURBANCE (1987) and Lucio Fulci's execrable THE GHOSTS OF SODOM (1988)! The group here, though, is among the most irritating of this lot (one of whom being the afore-mentioned Michele Soavi!) – especially after they have been possessed by the spirit of the witch Anibas (as it happens, the first letter of their individual names make up the witch's own appellation, while one other girl is called Sabina, i.e. no prize guessing what it spells in reverse!); the latter is played by Debora Caprioglio, then married to the much-older Klaus Kinski (and billed as such), whereas Eva Grimaldi – a popular starlet of the period – appears as Anibas. While the witch in BLACK Sunday had a couple of acolytes, here the sheer amount of these minions is ridiculous – since they are made out to exact revenge on just one of her 'tormentors', the priest presiding over her public punishment (who is the man himself, albeit blinded, and not a descendant!), even if his grisly demise has them adopt literally demonic features and eat him alive (after surviving getting crushed in his confessional when the kids form an ever-tightening circle and dance around it)!!

All of this, however, begs the question of why a young man in their midst escapes the witch's influence just so he can assume heroic status: maybe the woman had set him apart in order to personally defile him (apparently, he is a virgin, as is the "Kinski" character)…which she does repeatedly during the last half-hour or so, in the guise of Caprioglio herself (but, curiously enough, never Grimaldi's!) and, most memorably, a filthy hag with large chicken feet!! To be fair to the film this late in the game, it does incorporate a few elements from the Gogol tale (after all, there was only one victim in "The Vij", and he was a cleric whom the witch had seduced!) and, as I said, the snowy milieu was intriguing (though little is done with it in the long run); besides, the Mask of Satan (to which the original Italian title of both Bava movies translates) gets extra mileage here by coming in handy during the climax as well. With this in mind, it should be noted that Massimo De Rita – the co-writer of DEMONS 5: THE DEVIL'S VEIL – had also been the producer of BLACK Sunday!

Being that I love older horror, I have been doing my best to get my hands on as much of it as I can. The Demons series is interesting and always seems to be crazy. Good music and suspense in many of them. As of now, I think this one is my favorite of the series due to the atmosphere and sets. Demons 3 -The Ogre is also one I need to re-watch because the music was really awesome in that one..

Anyway, in this film, the ice caves with colored lights and the snowy abandoned town areas and church are all very beautiful. It also has lots of beautiful women and good, subtle music. The audio is in Italian and of course the characters are mostly just overacting.

I first watched this one on youtube with super low quality video and English subtitles. I thought it was good but knew it was a keeper when I couldn't get the dreamy feel and atmosphere out of my head. I started looking for a VHS copy and I finally got one for a nice price and watched it again today.

I understand some of the reviewers calling it slow because there is very little blood or gore compared to the other films in the Demons series. It also doesn't have much sense to it. It is kind of a nightmare about witches. At times it feel like more of a fantasy film than a horror film. It also kind of reminded me of the fantasy movie "Legend" at times because of the snow scenes and ambient music.

Certainly a movie that fans of old horror should enjoy!

This is one of the many made for cable horror films that Lamberto Bava directed at the end of the 1980s and that sadly disappeared in oblivion short after their making. Of course, these TV-productions don't belong to Bava junior's best works, but most of them are decent (except for the tedious "Dentro il Cimitero" and "La Casa dell' Orco"), and "La Maschera dell' Demonio" belongs to the best ones.

Even though the title suggests a remake of Mario Bava's 1960 landmark gothic horror film of the same title, this one has not much to do with it. Only the "historical background" is the same: the protagonists stumble over an old body of a witch with a mask on her face - and as soon as the mask is removed, evil things happen. The rest of the film is quite different to Bava senior's masterpiece. The setting is in the snowy mountains, and it's about possession, a hapless love relationship, demonic seduction (including a really nasty "date with a demoness") and surreal happenings. The surreal effects work by Italian master Sergio Stivaletti is very well done, remarkable for a rather low budgeted TV-production.

The film suffers a little bit from a slow pace halfway through it, but the climax which boosts some fine Lovecraftian ideas (that spawn most of the surreal effects work) makes up for it and is the real highlight of the movie. Add to that comparably decent acting (especially from Klaus Kinski's ex-girlfriend Deborah Caprioglio) and a good score by Simon Boswell, and You have a surprisingly good film that would have deserved far better distribution than it suffered a decade ago. 6 out of 10, and let's hope that "La Maschera del Demonio" won't be completely forgotten in the years to come.