Metacritic reviews

It owes much too much to Argento pal George Romero's zombie movies, but without enough of the suspense or metaphorical weight. That said, it still has more imagination and style going for it than most horror films.

Demons is a coffee-table book of a horror movie, reveling in a purity of transcendent revulsion that marks it as something that’s really only suitable for the truest and most devoted of aficionados. It’s a snob’s objet d’art, disguised as a blood offering.

All the people and places in Demons seem imported. The dialogue is spoken in colloquial American and matches the lip movements, but it sounds dubbed. Nonetheless, there are some apt observations.

If there's not much content -- and even less logic -- in Demons, there is a helluva lot of form. With its stark modern architecture and neon glare, West Berlin has a cold, hard atmosphere that's just right for the film, and the city has been captured gloriously by cinematographer Gianlorenzo Battaglia. [06 Sep 1986, p.13]

Regrettably, it's a mediocre slasher with a terrific gimmick.

Demons and Demons 2 are classic (if that’s the right term) examples of what happens when any pretence at style or subtlety goes out the window, in favour of in-your-face carnage which is so over-the-top that it is no longer remotely scary, but just plain nauseating.

There's not an original thought in sight — the story is Evil Dead in a movie theater — and it doesn't pay to give much thought to the self-referential implications of the story: The demons and their gross-out antics are the main event.