Kevin Strange’s Weird Movie Recommendation: Daemonium

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So it’s not often that a movie leaves me flabbergasted. Especially a movie made after about 1994. But this crazy ass flick Daemonium from 2015 did just that!

It was added on Netflix this month and in addition to the sweet monster head thumbnail pic, the synopsis piqued my interest enough to add it to my watch list. Now, everyone knows the watch list on Netflix is where movies we’re kinda interested in go to die.

In the world of instant streaming, 24/7 social media and every movie ever made at our fingertips, movies usually get one shot to grab our interest. We either click play or we never get around to watching it because there’s ALWAYS something brand new just around the corner to steal our attention away. “Oh, look! They added Captain America Civil War!” *PLAY*

But that synopsis kept popping into my head (from IMDB):

“The story of Daemonium begins in an alternate universe to ours, in which Magic and Technology Coexist with Humans and Demons. In Daemonium we see Razor rise to power! (He will be the new image of a dystopic power and seeks a full out war with Hell the demons that dwell there and anyone that stands in his way!), the doubts of Rebbecca (who will question everything she knew for a fact about her life), Lisa, a common woman with an unthinkable destiny (womanly force on their way), and the wizard and con artist Fulcanelli (facing his own destiny regardless of his intentions).”

I mean come on, right? If I’ve got a weakness for one thing, it’s trashy dystopian cyber techno future movies with magic and demons! (I wrote a whole book about a cyborg demon, after all.) So this particular piece of B movie cheese didn’t languish on the to watch list for long. I fired that badboy up and expected the worst.

When it comes to high concept, batshit crazy movies, the piss went out of the thing in the early 1990s. Movies after around 94 (with the exception of the best weird movie year of the decade 1999) started to cut back on the ham and cheese and started going for a more gritty realism look and feel (think the difference between Hard Target and Bloodsport.)

And then movies after around 2003-04 we get into the Sci-Fi channel, awful CGI monster, movies that can’t have any night shots and consist almost entirely of military dudes walking around in the woods with their guns pointed toward the sky kind of bullshit.

So settling in for a flick made in 2015 that I’d never heard of before it popped onto Netflix? Yeah, not expecting much. I figured I’d give it 5 minutes and the first sign of an army dude radioing in to his commanding officer in a cheaply lit army base set, I’d bail.

Instead the flick starts with a close-up shot of a hot chick in a school-girl outfit sucking on a lollipop. Mmmmk.

Within seconds she’s got a pair of weird cyberpunk guns out blasting away at a big ass group of demon-mutants. Now here’s the thing. When it comes to awful movies, I have one rule: Don’t be boring.

That rule manifests itself in several different ways. First, the story. If the story itself isn’t boring but it looks like shit and the dialogue is fucking laughable, I’m still in. If the story is incomprehensible but it LOOKS interesting and the dialogue sucks, I’m still in. If the story sucks, the visuals suck, but the dialogue is inventive, I’ll still keep watching.

Daemonium (as well as a lot of my favorite cheese-ball flicks) falls into the second category right off the bat. Each of the demon-mutants has its own unique look. This isn’t Dawn of the Dead, everybody’s blue with some CGI eyes thrown in for good measure. Every creature looks like it has its own back story. Like Albert Pyun got ahold of the Hellraiser franchise and got to design his own cenobites.

Now here’s where Daemonium sets itself apart from your average cool looking but still pretty fucking stupid B movie: After the school girl fights the demon-mutants, she’s deactivated by our real lead character, another chick. Turns out school girl is some weird demon robot. Awesome.

But it gets even better. Within 30 seconds of following our NEW lead girl, she gets her head fucking frozen off by yet another weird ass mutant chick who wields a pair of freezie batons or something. Ok?

So who’s the main character of this movie? It turns out to be a yet ANOTHER chick who takes over the story via voice-over and sends us into a flashback from just before the daemonapocalypse where we follow NOT HER, but her HUSBAND!

I’m super into the flick at this point because I’m a sucker for the misleading POV type of storytelling. I first encountered it on MTV’s Liquid Television Aeon Flux shorts where we’d follow a character for a few seconds only for them to be murdered violently by another character who we’d follow and then would die horribly etc. etc. until we finally got to Aeon who would herself die in each episode.

Another thing Daemonium reminds me of is the Japanese splatterpunk genre of films like Meatball Machine and Tokyo Gore Police (I’ll have a top list of my favorites in that genre up soon.) I looked up the director, Pablo Parés, and it turns out this ain’t his first rodeo.

He’s got titles like 100% Lucha and Plaga Zombies: Zona Mutante to his credit. In other words, he’s one of us. He gets it. He’s 38 so he’s a child of the 80s. The Troma and Full Moon generation. Saturday Morning cartoons, gross out toys. Those of us creators from that generation have a special connection to the weird and I picked up on it the moment the flick started.

Anyway, enough sucking this movie’s dick. The only downside for any lover of weird cinema is that the Netflix version of this movie IS in Spanish with English subtitles. I would venture to guess the DVD/Blu Ray version has an English dub on it but listen. I’ll tell you the same thing I tell my friends about Japanese Splatterpunk flicks and ultra-violent anime.

This ain’t Shakespeare. They’re not reciting three act sonnets. 99% of the movie is brutal action and super weird visuals. The dialogue is an afterthought. You won’t spend the whole movie reading. You’ll be too busy watching monsters with giant vagina heads and chicks with killer knitting yarn to pay attention to the sub titles. DON’T let that shy you away from this flick. You’ll regret it.

4 out of 5 demon-robot Strangeheads for Daemonium, the coolest B movie currently on Netflix.

6 thoughts on “Kevin Strange’s Weird Movie Recommendation: Daemonium

  1. Hi Kevin! Dany Casco here (Co creator, producer and actor from Daemonium)
    I´m glad that you have enjoyed Daemonium. Originally released as a web series (shooting began in 2010) the Netflix movie format had near 25 minutes of deleted footage, that´s why the story may be a little difficult to center in one character. Anyway, is good to see there is more people out there that prefers ´80 style of movies than the actual bored bomb blockbusters. Cheers!

    • lo acabo de ver por Netflix y me gusto, esta muy bien producido. muy entretenido. lo unico que puedo criticarles es que la trama se hace un poco confusa y pierde sentido a medio camino. pero no le quita que disfrute verlo. creo que uds. tienen mucho potencial y espero ver mas producciones, especialmente de este estilo. la verdad me sorprendio descubrir que era hecho en Argentina, no soy fan de la mayoria de las producciones nacionales porque siempre dejan mucho que desear o son aburridas. pero esta fue la excepcion. saludos!

  2. You certainly get it, Kevin. Cool review!

    PS: DAEMONIUM doesn’t have an English dub (not yet at least), because was directly launched into Netflix universe, previous a sequel of skirmishes on YouTube where it was uploaded by fragments first (hence his ‘strange’ edition, it was originally produced as a web-series). And here’s also a nice nerdy data: it was shooted ruling out direct sound -including actor’s voices. Those voices were dubbed by the ‘elite’ of the Latinoamerican dubbers for all the non-Spanish spoken films, series, anime and cartoons that we -the latin community down the Rio Grande ’till Argentina, where DAEMONIUM’s been made- are watching since forever. Magician Fulcanelli has the same voice McGyver had in the 80’s, and later on, Goku from DB, the same guy, a professional dubber.

    • Thanks for the comments, guys! I would have never guessed this was a series of Youtube shorts. I thought the POV shifts were intentional to throw off the audience’s perception of who to root for. Either way, it’s a very entertaining film and I’ve been recommending it to everyone since I saw it.

      Glad it’s getting great exposure on Netflix. Is a run on the Elray network in its future, perhaps?

  3. Was not disappointed by this film. I loved it in fact! Is anyone aware of anything similar, or by the same people behind this?

  4. Excellent movie, I like the sets, the characters were nice and destructive, kind of remimded me of the old Metalstorm Jared-syn movie but with more characters and better development. I loke that the villains andonsters aee actaully villians andonsters. The costume work was impressive, almost Rick Baker level. No CGI, thank God, real effort was put in to make this movie. I speak Spanish so the subtitles only added to the exoerience. Well done. I’m a fan
    Hopefully Pablo and Caro make a series form this. 4.5 out of 5 stars😎

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