The Church | Film Review | Slant Magazine

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

The Church ***½

by Ed Gonzalez on March 15, 2002 Jump to Comments (1) or Add Your Own

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Only Michele Soavi has ever come close to matching the breathtaking awe of a hyper-stylized Argento set piece. Soavi and Argento are no strangers to perfunctory storytelling, but while a Soavi tableaux may be considerably less colorful than Argento's stained glass cinema, the man possesses a singular attentiveness for the poetry of signs and symbols. Though sometimes referred to as Demons 3, La Chiesa (The Church) is too visually breathtaking to be treated as another entry in Lamberto Bava's schlocky Demons series. The Teutonic Knights eradicate and bury an entire village because a cross-shaped stigmata is discovered on the bottom of a young girl's foot. Soavi's egregious use of cross imagery fascinatingly suggests the pervasiveness of the Christian threat to paganism. Once the village is buried and the site is branded with a huge cross, Soavi pulls back to reveal the floor of a modern-day church. The camera travels backward from the church's basement to its exterior, exiting through cavernous passageways and, most astoundingly, the face of a stone statue. Set to Philip Glass's hypnotic "Floe," this backward movement chillingly suggests that a dormant holy-place-within-a-holy-place is itching to be discovered. Lamberto Bava hastily ensnares his victims within thoroughly modern edifices (in Demons a movie theater, in Demons 2 an apartment complex), wasting no time unleashing his hungry zombies, but Soavi strikes a more delicate balance, sensually incorporating a victim (and her bridesmaid's veil) into the entrapment ritual before subjecting churchgoers to awesome hallucinations (including one genuinely pedo-pervy interlude between two grade school boys that Michael Jackson probably has on a loop somewhere in one of Neverland Ranch's back rooms). The film's pacing is evocatively screwy—Soavi, though, doesn't seem to care. In one scene, an old woman and her husband bang on a church bell. The next time the spectator sees the couple, the old woman is using her husband's severed head to hit the bell. Soavi's horror is terrifyingly suggestive, so much so that its difficult to determine what is real and what is the product of subconscious sexual desire and altered consciousness. There's plenty of schmaltz to go around but there is no denying the dreaminess of Soavi's stream-of-conscious horror show.

Director(s): Michele Soavi
Screenplay: Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini, Michele Soavi
Cast: Hugh Qusarshie, Tomas Arana, Feodor Chaliapin Jr., Barbara Cupisti, Antonella Vitale, Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Asia Argento, Roberto Caruso
Runtime: 102 min.
Rating: R
Year: 1988

Comments

No-Personality on May 21, 2010, 01:46 PM: Schmaltz? Try: schlock. And Soavi lays this tasteless stuff on us heavier and thicker than shit excreted from a milkshake machine. I was willing to give Fulci's cult films the benefit of the doubt because, despite the weakness of his over-the-top gore sequences, the religious stuff wasn't so poorly handled. But if there is anything more painful here than the ghastly, goofy costumes, the ultra-cheap make-up effects, and the time devoted to showing off both in an absurd number of closeups (I dearly hope it's this kind of thing you were referring to when you blasted "analog age" effects in your review of the Nightmare on Elm Street remake)â€”it's that insipid, idiotic old man character (and the guy doing his dubbing) wailing meaningless drivel about "the Devil." Which is sad; this is quite a comedown for that actor after working with Argento. There is nothing delicate about this movie. The sensuality here has all the honest sensual-ness of something equally as schlocky, like Troll 2. Or, as you mention, Lamberto Bava's Demons films. In the case of those films, fans don't mistake that they are anything but schlock. The Church: dreamy? More like: deliriously sweaty violent vomiting from a nasty turn of the flu. This makes me yearn for Manhattan Baby. The appallingly unattractive elements of that film are at least laughable.