Some kids are hiking in the mountains, and one of them goes into a large tunnel and discovers some old mummified gladiator. He puts on the gladiator's helmet and spends the rest of the movie killing all the other hikers.This thing is just so utterly senseless it's maddening. Here's a short list of things that don't make any sense:1) A guy and a girl are in their tent and they think they hear something outside. The guy goes out to investigate and finds another hiker outside. Then he hears his girlfriend scream so they head back to the tent - arriving the next morning?!? He was only 50 feet away!2) These two dunderheads then hear another girl scream (What, 100 feet away?), but don't investigate because they're afraid they'll get lost.3) Another guy and a girl are walking around, and in about their 10th scene together the girl informs the guy that due to the circumstances, protocol no longer requires him to address her as professor. I mean, what the...? First off, that's just a really stupid thing to say, secondly he never called her professor in the first nine scenes they were in together.4) A wounded girl attacks Demonicus and he stops her, telling her that part of his gladiator training taught him how to wound without killing. Um, yeah, we kinda noticed she's wounded and not dead because she's up and walking around. But, thanks for that tidbit of information.5) One girl is tied up in Demonicus' lair, and when someone attempts to free her, she instead instructs this person to go and get help. Um, look, idiot, if she set you free, which would take about 5 seconds, there would be no need to get help.And it just goes on and on. The whole middle part of the movie is spent with the two idiots getting lost in the woods, then they fight, then they pitch a tent and ignore the screams of their friends, then they wander around some more. It's just so damned boring and pointless that I turned the DVD off halfway through. None of these characters are sympathetic, especially the ones that get the majority of the screen time. Demonicus himself made me laugh out loud every time I saw him - he looks like a kid in a Halloween costume, scrunching his face up to look evil. He runs, or should I say scampers around like he's gay. The special effects are comedic, the acting is for the most part awful, and nothing makes any sense.Overall, maybe this concept could have produced an enjoyably campy film if they put some more time and effort into it, getting rid of the ludicrous dialogue, creating characters with actual likable personalities, having some sort of logical flow to the action, and maybe even making Demonicus a female character in a sexy gladiator outfit. But no, instead we get this senseless pile of nonsense that will bore you to death.

As far as direct-to-video movies go, this one looks pretty decent. The acting is above par, the locations are nice, the premise is nifty. Unfortunately, the movie is devoid of any suspense because the actor playing Tyranus (or Demonicus, whatever) is not very scary. It's just some college kid running around dressed in gladiator garb. And unfortunately, without that much needed suspense, the film just kind of plods along.The movie plays out as such: characters get lost in the mountains, Tyranus appears running toward them from the distance, characters get slain. Had Tyranus looked like a demon or a zombie, the suspense would have been higher. And had Tyranus leaped out from behind bushes or something instead of running down brightly lit paths, the suspense would have been higher.But it still looks good and all of the actors are pretty decent, so I can't write it off as a total waste of time. But it could have and should have been a whole lot better.

This low-budget project just doesn't have the sense of fun that it should have. Any enthusiasm or wit behind the camera (or in front of it, for that matter) just doesn't show. It appears more and more hapzard as it goes on. Low budgets and quick wrap times considered, this one just offers wasted potential and no energy. Not one of Charlie Band and company's better efforts, particulary disappointing, since it's one of his few slasher-style efforts.

All good movies "inspire" some direct to video copycat flick. I was afraid that "Gladiator" wasn't really that good a film, because I hadn't seen any movie that had anything remotely resembling anything Roman on the new releases shelf for months. Then I spotted Full Moon's latest offering, Demonicus. I'm a fan of Full Moon's Puppetmaster series, and Blood Dolls, but had never seen one of their non-killer puppet films. Anyway...Demonicus chronicles what happens to a group of campers in the mountains of the Alps. One of the campers, James, finds a cave with old gladiator artifacts, and feels impelled to remove a helmet from a corpse and try it on. He becomes possessed, and, as the demonic gladiator Tyrannus, is impelled to kill his friends to revive the corpse, who is the real Tyrannus.Granted, like many Full Moon films, this has little or no budget. At times, the editing and direction was so amateurish I'd swear I was watching the Blair Witch Project. The attempts at chopping off of limbs and heads reminds me of a Monty Python skit. The weapons, although apparently real, look really plastic-y. It literally looks like this was filmed by a group of friends with a digital camcorder on a weekend. Granted, there's nothing wrong with such film-making, just don't rent this expecting a technical masterpiece. It looks like there were attempts at research for the script too, because, even though Tyrannus really doesn't act much like a gladiator until the end, at least he speaks Latin.All trashing aside, I actually enjoyed this film. Not as much as a killer puppet film, perhaps, but Full Moon still delivers! The only thing that disappointed me was there was no Full Moon Videozone at the end!