Lamberto Bava’s 1985 Italian
horror film Demons, concerning a
movie theater full of patrons who are infected with a virus that transforms
them into bloodthirsty Hellspawns, became an instant hit and generated a sequel
the following year. Produced and
co-written by Dario Argento and former Lucio Fulci screenwriter Dardano
Sacchetti, the film featured part-time actor and assistant director Michele
Soavi on the cast, notably making an appearance in the first film as a masked
villain.
Years later, what was
intended to be the third entry in the Demons
film series fell into Soavi’s lap and an unprecedented move, Soavi pulled a
Halloween III: Season of the Witch by
making the third film a standalone piece with zero relation to the films before
it. Dubbing the first two Demons films ‘pizza schlock’, Soavi
wrote out any and all references to the previous films. Springboarding from M.R. James’ short story The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, Soavi’s
film The Church which presumably
would have been the site for a third demonic viral outbreak instead envisions a
gothic horror fable about a medieval German cathedral with a centuries-old
demonic secret buried underneath it.
After young librarian Evan
(Tomas Arana) joins the church to work with college art student Lisa (Barbara
Cupisti) to restore the cathedral’s paintings, he inadvertently stumbles upon
the long-buried gateway to the unholy netherworld. On the cusp of a brief visit by a fashion crew
working a photoshoot, the church doors seal themselves shut, locking everyone
inside as all manner of pandemonium slowly begins to break loose.
Far more nuanced and
mannered than the previous Demons films
with an emphasis on more methodical pacing and painterly camerawork, The Church jettisons the cheap thrills
in favor of a more serious tone and approach to storytelling. Featuring a teenage Asia Argento in addition
to Feodor Chaliapin and Hugh Quarshie, The
Church shares the ensemble cast roots of the Demons films with no single character or actor taking center stage
yet with a completely different execution.
Boasting ornate
cinematography of the cathedral by Renato Tafuri and sporting a score of new as
well as preexisting material by Keith Emerson, Philip Glass, Goblin and Fabio
Pignatelli, the film is a bit of a smorgasbord of originality and
derivation. Scenes of a mud-covered
unholy altar crawling with writhing naked bodies rising from the ground are
striking in their creativity while other scenes such as a Satanic dragon-goat
creature raping a hypnotized female victim steal so blatantly from Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby they border on
plagiarism. It wouldn’t be so
aggravating if it didn’t use musical cues and shot arrangements that are
virtually identical to the 1968 genre classic.
Soavi even went so far as to utilize the same chanting sounds heard on
the soundtrack to Polanski’s film without changing a note.
Nods such as a neon blue
cross forming the portal into the underworld feel like a nod to Michael Mann’s The Keep which I’ll happily argue is the
superior film here. The aforementioned
Philip Glass cues themselves, culled from his album Glassworks, while ever brilliant couldn’t help but take me out of
the The Church and drop me right into
Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi. Soavi clearly displays an affinity for the
classy potentiality of the genre and yet wears his influences so proudly on his
sleeve they tend to work against the film.
In the end The Church emerges as a beautifully
stylized picture that is remarkable for its visual splendor and serious-minded
tone with one of the bleaker finales in any of the Demons films. Equal parts
baroque thanks to the church setting and steeped in apocalyptic religious
imagery Bosch would be proud of, there’s plenty to recommend here yet there’s
also enough overt nods to films which inspired it's creation to tamper with
your investment in The Church.
When it dives inward down
the film’s increasingly dark subterranean tunnels of Hell, it works
beautifully. When it reaches outward to
grab from preexisting properties we’re more than familiar with, it becomes
frustrating and unintentionally deflates some of the artistic powers of the
more creative sequences. Imperfect and
highly derivative but still a curious, wildly different direction for the
loosely connected Demons film series
to take.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki