Ghosts and Monsters and Zombies and Demons

I can't say the end of the 80's is my favorite period for horror movies. They were tamer, less interesting to watch, painfully directed... the style was gone, the screenplays abysmal... Name one classic horror movie of 1988.

So?

No? Nothing? Nada?Nichts? Zilch? Zapped? Zapped again?

That's my point. Nothing special, just a bunch of straight-to-video products that may have today that 80's patina that is so fun to watch today. But no classic.

One of the last of the true classics is maybe Lamberto Bava's DEMONS, the last gasp of italian horror. Buckets of gore, non-stop action, a helicotper thru the cinema roof, hundreds of flesh-hungry demons, decapitations... you name it, it has it.  It has also, among others, composer Claudio Simonetti. Escaped from the Goblin, he created a fun electronic score. Sadly, he went on doing more or less the same stuff afterwards. There's indeed the fact that the material he had to work with was reaaaaaaaally poor. 

Harry Kirkpatrick's Nightmare Beach, Vittorio Rambaldi's Rage and Ruggero Deodato's Love Threat (a.k.a Dial help) were incredibly poor efforts in the horror/thriller genre. And the soundtrack to each movie sounds like the same. Same electronic variations, same material, same atmosphere. The "worms on the sand" track on Love Threat is exactly identical to one used in Lamberto Bava's Midnight Horror three years earlier. Talk about work.

But for whoever likes (like me) that unmistakable Simonetti's 80's patina, these are gems from another dimension.