The Church begins promisingly enough with your standard Middle-Ages prologue wherein a bunch of knights are riding around killing witches, killing the witches’ kids, burning stuff, spearing folks, crushing heads, and having a mass burial. Even the freaking pets are murdered!
Even though the ingredients are obviously there for an enjoyable bit of witch-hunting, things seem a bit tight in the budget area. You get the sense that these guys are riding around the same little bit of set over and over and that there’s just two buildings and a bunch of hay. There’s an overwhelming feeling of smallness to the sequence and I find it difficult to believe that the woods in the 1500s were that cramped.
Once we hurtle toward the present (or at least the late 1980s where gals had butch haircuts and guys didn’t), you quickly appreciate the straight forward drama that a good old fashioned witch round up and slaughter had because what you get the rest of the movie is something that resembles the giant mass of poop-covered humanity that rises up from the bowels of the church once the demons are unleashed towards the end of the film.
Our chief morons are introduced to us in short order. There’s Lisa, the girl who is restoring some of the creepy murals in the church. Evan is the greedy librarian who gets his hands on an ancient parchment and instantaneously decides that it must hold the key to where the crap that was kept in the Ark of the Covenant (Ten Commandments, Adam’s rib, Jesus’ pog collection – you know, stuff like that) is.
So Evan is making out in bed with Lisa (church hookups are the best!) when he has what passes for a brainstorm and interrupts his love making and solves the riddle on the parchment. Of course! He just has to find the statue with the seven eyes!
Duh! That’s the elephant-headed thing that’s down in the basement of the church that is really the seal that is holding in all the demons from hell! You don’t think Evan is going to undo that seal like it was some church girl’s pants do you?
Once the seal is popped, strange things begin to happen in the church. Strange things like Evan trying to look up the dress of a pre-pubescent Asia Argento, trying to rape Lisa, and weirdest of all, the appearance of a black guy in the church.
This was odd because other than Italian movies with biker gangs, blacks are kind of underrepresented in these sorts of flicks.
This time, the black guy actually has an important role, playing the lovable Father Gus. Gus is only as good as the material he is given though, so we are forced to watch him practice some archery against a phantom knight and try to wrestle some secret papers from the elderly bishop.
Gus figures out that the church was built to keep some demons inside of it and that it was specially constructed to collapse in on itself if the demons ever came up from the basement. This would prevent the demons from getting loose in Rome and doing evil stuff like make the women there shave their armpits.
But would we really care if the church collapsed if it only housed Father Gus, Evan, Lisa, and Asia Argento? Well, what if we added a bunch of other nondescript (except for their irritatingly obvious cannon fodder status) folks like the old sight-seeing couple, the people there on a photo shoot, the class on a field trip, and the two people whose motorcycle broke down (because if your motorcycle breaks down in Rome the only place to get it fixed is at the old haunted church)?
To pad out a movie that desperately needs tightening up, we have to watch a couple of death scenes involving these recently trapped people. Among the highlights is the old lady using her elderly husband’s head to ring the church bell and some broad getting smashed by a subway. Don’t even bother to try and figure out how she wondered into the bowels of the church only to end up hanging in a subway tunnel.
The church finally collapses and everyone is killed except Lotte (Argento) who ran out of the church before it went into lockdown. Of course she only ran out after she saw that her father had turned into some type of monster. So how did she deal with that? Dancing the night away at one of the local nightclubs. Sounds like a pretty bad case of post-traumatic stress to me.
Anyway, she decides to go back to the church to see what’s up with her dad turning into a demon and runs into Father Gus. Uh, wasn’t the church in lockdown? Yup, but Lotte has a secret way in and out of the church! She uses it to escape again before it collapses, but I couldn’t help but think that that whole bit kind of undermined the entire point of the movie.
Let’s see: church locks up and collapses so demons can’t escape, except there is a way to escape after all, but only a little girl knows it? So basically your movie is telling me that the legions of hell are dumber than some little kid? What kind of wuss demons are we dealing with here?
In the end, there’s only two things you need to know about this one: the guy that played Father Gus is Hugh Quarshie. The Internet Movie Database claims he will not play the role of Othello because it is demeaning to blacks. Somehow though he was not only not demeaned in this thing, but also wasn’t demeaned in The Phantom Menace!
The other thing I took away from this movie was in the text bio on director Michele Soavi that came on the DVD. After they tried to explain how The Church was great even though it flopped, they noted that on his next film, The Sect, Soavi used some of his own personal possessions to decorate the set, including his collection of ceramic bunnies!
It’s no surprise then that after making The Sect and Dellamorte Dellamore, he disappeared into that Italian exploitation director’s witness protection program known as Italian TV! And you know that’s a BYOP (Bring Your Own Pottery) affair!
© 2011 MonsterHunter
I didn’t even get passed your 4th paragraph. The Church is an amazing movie, that is telling the story of how the church aka catholic’s who burned so called devil worshippers whom were actually just people with more open minds and progressive thoughts. people who didn’t believe the church’s lies and didn’t want to be under the church’s control were killed for being different. the whole movie was great. I think you suck as a person and should just kill yourself insted on talking about trying to sound cool.