SPECTERS (1987), MAYA (1989)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Having been thoroughly disgusted with this inferior "demons on the loose" flick from Lucio Fulci, I promptly watched a couple more by a director I'd never heard of, Marcello Avallone. Neither was very good, but cumulatively they did cleanse my palate.

SPECTERS had nothing going for it except that all its thoroughly routine characters are at least consistent in the ways they act and react, in contrast to DEMONIA. Donald Pleasance is the only "name" actor, and he's just playing a standard "archeologist who unearths a demon from an old sepulchre." The archeological dig takes place near Rome, but Avallone and his co-writers couldn't be bothered to name the evil entity that starts knocking off cookie-cutter victims. The one slightly memorable thing about SPECTERS occurs when Avallone shamelessly rips off a scene from a Freddy Kruger film.

The flattery of imitation served Avallone better in MAYA, his second and last horror movie. This too is also a "demon on the loose" flick, but this time he's doling out gore-scenes worthy of Fulci, whom I suspect he studied before doing this film.

This time Avallone leads off with a Carlos Castaneda quote, a Mexican setting, and a demon whose name, Xibalba, is taken from the cognomen of the Mayan land of death. William Berger-- who's the Big Name this time, at least in the Euro-market-- dies early in MAYA, when his meddling unleashes Xibalba-- not a pure demon, but a once-mortal Mayan ruler who crossed over to the land of death to escape an enemy tribe. Now that he's loose, Xibalba wants to kill pretty much all the descendants of his enemies.

This dollop of mythology has no purpose save to give context to the multiple gore-killings, but that's a good in itself, given how little context appeared in both SPECTERS and DEMONIA. Further, MAYA offers two relatively memorable POV characters: Lisa, who comes to Mexico to learn how her father (Berger) was slain, and Peter, who helps Lisa because he hopes to get into her pants. Avallone also works in three other hot girls, all of whom get horribly killed by Xibalba, and even the non-gore scenes are much more vivid than anything in SPECTERS. MAYA suggests that Avallone might have been able to do at least more passable horror-thrillers-- but the movie flopped, and Avallone turned to other genres thereafter.