Too much of everything

Thanks for the memories!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

DEMONOID is a cheapo Mexican horror movie, shot south-of-the-border with a couple of notable Hollywood performers as the leads. The plot is about a demonic presence which is uncovered in an old mine and proceeds to unleash itself upon the unsuspecting populace. In actuality, this turns out to be an addition to the 'possessed hand' cycle of filmmaking, with ample opportunity for lots of gory moments and various demonic possessions and amputations. Samantha Eggar plays the wild-eyed protagonist, required to constantly tear out her hair and react to supernatural nastiness, and she's given solid support from a boozy Stuart Whitman playing a crusading priest who helps her fight the demon. It's simplistic stuff, but fast-paced and occasionally frightening, so you could do worse.

Jennifer Baines, played by the lovely Samantha Eggar, joins her husband Mark (character actor Roy Jenson, in one of the bigger roles of his career) as he attempts to open a Mexican mine. The workers don't want to cooperate because they're superstitious, so he and she go poking around. They mess around with the artifacts laying around, and a cursed severed hand takes possession of him, making him do odd (and profitable) things. The hand is soon free to control a succession of hapless victims, while she teams up with a priest (a grim looking Stuart Whitman) who's having a crisis of faith.Director Alfredo Zacarias ("The Bees") co-scripted this one, based on his own story, an update of "The Beast with Five Fingers" type stories. (Interestingly, this came out the same year as Oliver Stones' "The Hand".) It sets a tone early on, revealing itself to be schlock of the most priceless kind. If one were to take it seriously as a horror film, it'd be an utter failure, but if one accepts it as tongue in cheek, it's quite funny. The sheer incompetence on display is staggering. The special effects are amusing, the dialogue ridiculous, and the art direction by old pro Robert Burns is effective. Zacarias tries to spice things up a bit with breast shots (in the opening few minutes) and an action scene, but his bumbling misdirection is simply laughable.Fortunately, Eggar doesn't look *too* serious. Whitman looks appropriately embarrassed. Lew Saunders is hilarious as the cop who pays an impromptu visit to a surgeon, in a memorable sequence. Erika Carlsson ("The Devil's Rain"), Ted White (Jason in "Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter"), and Haji ("Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!") co-star.Good fun for people who want to see characters devise ways to rid themselves of their left hands.Five out of 10.

...there's not much point in watching "Demonoid: Messenger of Death". Had they gone deeper into the history of how the first hand became a killer hand, maybe the movie would have been better. But just showing one scene of a cult, and then showing a husband and wife going into a Mexican mine and finding the remains of a temple, thereby releasing an evil hand? Not good enough.Anyway, this isn't the worst movie (it's easily more interesting than "Baryshnya-Krestyanka" or "Everyone Says I Love You"). But they could have easily developed it further. I suspect that Samantha Eggar and Stuart Whitman don't try to stress this on their resumes. Pretty lame.

I wonder if this movie somehow inspired "Evil Dead II"!! A demoniac and perverted hand with a bad attitude spreads terror. That's all you need to know.Damn it, the effect of the moving hand is the best feature about this cheapie mess. The hand's performance was truly menacing and comic at the same time! It starts a killing spree while possessing, then, it hides under Samantha Eggar's sheets (dirty hand!), and if it wasn't enough, it jumps over a moving car without a stunt double. That's my kind of entertainment. Now seriously, this movie is as cheap as you can imagine. There are some unintentionally funny situations, CHEAP false scares, horrible f/x, and putrid score. Not even the groovy music is likable.The premise is good but you can't do anything good with such an extremely low budget and cheap production values. But in defense of this movie, it's meant to be pure B-entertainment. Although the movie is boring, it has it's moments of cheesiness and Mystery Science Theatre material. At some points I thought I was watching a bad episode of "Miami Vice"! The car chasing, and shootings just demonstrate how poor this Horror oriented movie is. "The Hand will kill again!". Oh , I forgot to praise the horrible one-liners.