The Church (1988)
Being in a particularly self-loathing mood, I decided to self-medicate by watching a movie that while it was actually made by Michele Soavi (director of Stage Fright, star of A Blade In The Dark), the good people at Anchor Bay have plastered Dario Argento's name all over it, claiming that he somehow is "presenting" this movie to me or something. Memo to Dario: you need to start reading stuff they shove in front of you before signing it, dude.
The Church is notorious for any number of reasons (it's involved in the whole twisted up mess that is the Demons series of movies - it was supposed to be Demons 3 at one time, it gets constantly bashed here at MonsterHunter for being the epitome of boring Italian-inspired mayhem, and it features a cool-looking monster humping a broad in a church) and when I fired it up I was pretty much making a dry run on my latest suicide attempt. (So this is what death is like - aimless happenings between people I don't know, all set to an auditory assault that somehow manages to marry bad cathedral music with bad Italian synth-horror movie music).
Like most of the really stupid decisions I ever made in my life (finishing high school, finishing college, getting a job, trusting women), deep down I knew the damage I was inflicting on myself since I had seen this one back in the late eighties and remember falling asleep during it, even though it was the middle of the afternoon and I was still young enough that I didn't go to bed at 6:30 (after my 4:00 feeding at the local Sizzler).
I remembered two things about the movie: there were some knights running around at the beginning of it and a bunch of dummies ended up trapped in a church somehow and after watching it again in the middle of the afternoon and almost falling asleep, that's pretty much all I can remember now as well.
The movie opens up with your standard Middle-Ages prologue wherein a bunch of knights are riding around killing witches, their kids, and even their pets!
This involves a lot of riding around in the woods and around some lame village
where stuff gets burnt, people get speared, heads are crushed, and there's even
a mass burial for your money.
Even though the ingredients are 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 like two buildings and a bunch of hay. There's just an overwhelming feeling of smallness 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 nineteen-eighties 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 and then you've got Evan, 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. Stuff
like Evan trying to look up the dress of a pre-pubescent Asia Argento (guess he
was way out in front of that fad, huh?), Evan trying to rape Lisa (hey, he was
just finishing what she started the other night, right?), and weirdest of all,
the appearance of a black guy in the church.
This was odd, because other than Italian movies with biker gangs or something, blacks are kind of underrepresented in things, especially when the flick takes place in Italy (as opposed to when they take place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland or one of those islands where zombies are running roughshod over gay porn stars.
This time, the black guy actually has an important role, which puts the Italian gore movie industry ahead of the NFL, and is 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 (this never had any bearing on anything else in the movie and we never saw Gus bust out his way-sweet bow and arrow again) 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 shave their armpits.
But would we really care if the church collapsed if it only housed Father Gus, Evan, Lisa, and Lotte (Asia)? 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 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?
"Crap! The front door is locked! I guess we'll just have to harass some of these boobs that got trapped in the church until Father Gus presses the self-destruct button!"
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 Soavi that came on the DVD. It talked about his work on The Sect which followed this movie and after they tried to explain how The Church was great even though it flopped, they noted that on The Sect, Soavi used some of his own personal possessions to decorate the set, including his collection of ceramic bunnies! I think it goes without saying that Soavi pretty much dropped out of sight after making The Sect and Dellamorte Dellamore. And where is he now? All together now: Italian TV! No doubt with his animal pottery in tow.