The Demoness - Digital Review

Movie
I’m not going to lie here. I have a weakness for horror movies in general, but I have a strange curiosity about foreign horror movies. And I don’t mean mainstream non Hollywood films from Australia, England, or other standardized “foreign” locations. I mean full-on Russian, Ukrainian, Czechoslovakian, and other such off the beaten path films. So naturally I was curious when I saw Well Go USA announce 2024’s The Demoness a few months ago. Looking it up I was VERY confused. IMDB pulled up no information, but by looking around I realized that the international title was actually Succubus, but again, I ended up confused. That’s when a forum deep dive revealed exactly why I was so perplexed when my research revealed something completely different than the press release. It turns out that there were TWO films in 2024 with the name Succubus. One of which was released recently by Scream Factory on DVD, which is what my Google-fu had pulled up initially. After a little hunting and pecking, I finally got the information I was looking for, and voila, we have Russia’s The Demoness (Succubus) in front of us today.

Billed as an erotic horror movie, Serik Beyseu’s attempt at a horror movie plays out much less erotic, and more downright hilariously (albeit unintentionally) and campy. The film is a mix of Temptation Island, the horror remake of Fantasy Island, and a little bit of Evil Dead 2 all at once. Our story begins with a young woman (played by Angelina Pahomova) running terrified through a forest, only to become consumed by said forest in a very Evil Dead 2 sort of way. Flash forward (it seems like a flashback, but it’s actually a fast forward) to the present and we’re introduced to our protagonists in the form of a couples retreat. Each couple has problems with their relationships, and they were brought to this little island getaway to undergo a harshly therapeutic retreat that is meant to bring the couples closer together by testing them.

At first the little games they play seem harmless enough, but it’s not long before the contestants realize that they’re being hunted by something, somewhere on the island, and it’s bringing out their deepest and darkest desires. As you would expect, that’s where the “erotic” portion of the horror comes into play, but it’s less erotic and more just “oh, wow, random nudity while I laugh myself silly at the horrible dialog” while it skips ahead to the next plot point. The real dissection of what’s going on is in the form of Stacey (Angelina Pahomova) who is looking for her twin sister (who we saw at the beginning of the movie) who she believes vanished here. As she does her little investigation, the audience is clued into the big bad demon known as the Succubus, luring people to their deaths on the island. Now she and a few of the other participants in the game have to hunt said baddy down, and kill it. Simple, right?

I enjoyed the Russian horror film The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead back in 2018, so I was willing to give this flick a shot, but woooooooooooow. I was not expecting it to be this bad. The film really SHOULD be very sensual, with a creepy and erotic take that could have been done very well in competent hands. Unfortunately, the film is a mixture of two competing tones fighting for supremacy, with neither really given a true victory. The base story is a fairly typical demon-based horror movie, with it trying to consume victims, and said victims turning on it. We’ve seen that a million times. The erotic element just comes across as unintentionally hilarious, with random nudity thrown in for what seems like no reason, and when it IS explained near the end, said reveal doesn’t make up for the silliness of it all. There are a few cool special effects as the participants make their way through the hazy jungle maze, but the jump scares simply sucked, and the dialog sounds like it was written by ChatGPT listening to someone speak in broken English.




Rating:

Not Rated by the MPAA




Video:

Yadda yadda yadda, this is a stream, yadda yadda, thus I won’t give a star rating due to bandwidth limitations. Ambiance-wise, this is a very moody and atmospheric film. Colors are very blue-tinged, with dark shadows everywhere, and amber-hued flame-based lighting. It’s dark and grungy, but I still noticed plenty of detail, despite the obvious compression used from the Cinema app that Well Go USA utilizes for their streaming review copies. It looks cool but is heavily stylized, so with the blue tinge things tend to look a bit softish by nature, outside of any compression issues.








Audio:

The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix that was on the stream was actually really good. Dialog is crisp and clean, sound effects come through nicely on the rears, and the bass response was actually really good. Way better than I expected in fact. Quite a few jump scares in the film slam you back in your seat with a nice bass drop, and overall it’s a very impressively aggressive mix when called upon. HOWEVER, I have to talk about it here because it makes such an incredible impact on the film itself. The Dub. Usually with foreign released films from Well Go USA on Blu-ray we get the original language track along with the dub, but we only get the dub on this stream from them. And said dub is soooooooooooooooooooooo bad. I’m talking 1960s chop-socky Shaw Brothers dub bad, just in Russian. The voices are hilariously mismatched, and even though it’s lip-synced fairly well, makes it seem like other people entirely should be attached to those voices. It’s one of the main reasons why I think this just came across as campy. The dub should have been eliminated entirely and subtitles used with the original Russian track. At least then it would have sounded natural and we might have gained a half-star rating from me at least.







Extras:

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As I said, I never went in with expectations that The Demoness was going to rival Get Out or The Evil Dead or anything, but this was one of the most hilariously painful watches of my life. The movie’s writing, dialog, and general acting were bottom of the barrel, BUT I will fully admit that the ambiance and atmosphere of the movie was pretty cool. I don’t normally do streaming only digital reviews unless for the major studios ala Fox/Disney, but I was morbidly curious here. You win some, you lose some. I’m going to recommend that most people skip this entirely unless they want to have an inebriated horror movie marathon with friends. Then, by all means, have at it.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Angelina Pahomova, Polina Davydova, Pierre Bourel
Directed by: Serik Beyseu
Written by: Oleg Kurochkin, Dmitriy Zhigalov
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1
Audio: English: DD 5.1
Subtitles: English
Studio: Well Go USA
Rated: NR
Runtime: 96 Minutes
Digital Release Date: January 11th, 2025

I actually REALLY enjoyed the horror remake of Fantasy Island....where's that put me on this? Where's the pie chart analysis and Venn diagram of the influence on this film.

Travis Ballstadt said:

I actually REALLY enjoyed the horror remake of Fantasy Island....where's that put me on this? Where's the pie chart analysis and Venn diagram of the influence on this film.

Click to expand...

oh goodness, that's going to be a tough call. Fantasy Island was sort of garbagey fun. It was schlocky, but had some fun performances. This movie feels similar in some ways (the whole "live out your fantasy on a creepy island" thing), but also differes heavily in that the english Dub is HORRIBLE. Like I'm talking B-grade Kunfu movie on the WB saturday from back in 2000 level of dubbing. As a result the characters come across as very flat and cliched to the extreme. It's so bad that I almost had fun with it. Worst case scenario you check it out and want to curse my ancestors for reccomending it, BUT if you loved Fantasy Island there's a chance you might actually get a kick out of this.

I can't imagine watching this.

Mike, you're taking another bullet for the betterment of the larger world of movie viewers. And for that, I thank you!!!!

Yeah... gotta feel a bit sorry for you on this one.