Cult Cinema: The Convent (2000) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Multicom

Cult indie director Mike Mendez who recently cameoed in the James Wan film Malignant first burst onto the independent horror film scene with his 1996 film Killers followed by his foray into horror comedy Bimbo Movie Bash a year later.  In the year 2000 his third feature, a comedy-horror film involving a Satanic cult called The Convent, got lost in the shuffle when the film’s original intended distributor A-Pix went belly up and the film was shopped around at horror conventions and bootlegs on eBay before Trimark Pictures finally sorted out the rights issues in 2002 when it released on tape and DVD. 

 
Though long out of print on physical media sadly, smaller cult film label Multicom which has been snatching up and rereleasing a number of cult horror films on digital streaming media picked it up and rereleased it in a new 4K restoration.  While the results of this lean mean indie are still a bit rusty with print damage about the image, this was a fun little straight-to-video film that was more or less forgotten until Multicom made it available to streamers.  Hidden horror gem or a throwaway beer-and-pizza movie?  Whatever the case, it has more than a few surprises up its sleeve including unlikely cameos from longstanding horror screen veterans.
 
Opening on a young woman in glasses armed with a shotgun breaking into a convent and murdering each and every nun in it before setting it ablaze, The Convent fast forwards several years later to the now derelict and abandoned building where its become a hotspot for college kids to break into, destroy things and hopefully meet a ghost in the purportedly haunted house along the way.  

Zeroing in on Clorissa (Joanna Canton) who is about to venture out to said location with some frat boys when her dorky brother Brant (Liam Kyle Sullivan) and her goth girl friend Mo (Megahn Perry) ask to tag along.  Once inside the convent messing around with pot and hazing Brant to get into their fraternity, Mo is attacked by a group of young Satanists hiding in the convent who intend to sacrifice her to bring Satan back down unto Earth.  Needless to say, it doesn’t go as planned as Mo is transformed into a demonically possessed killing machine that slays everyone in her path and everyone attacked immediately also becomes possessed.

 
A product of the 2000s from start to finish with its herky-jerky subliminal editing by John Rosenburg, flashy slick cinematography by Jason Lowe and a synth-rock heavy score by Joseph Bishara, The Convent manages to work in both Bill Moseley and Coolio as crooked cops and most notably Adrienne Barbeau in a most unlikely role of femme fatale.  Think of Barbeau as the female version of James Woods’ vampire hunter in John Carpenter’s Vampires or Sigourney Weaver’s warrior from Aliens.  

Shot on the fly in 18 days in Los Angeles for just under half a million dollars and penned by Chaton Anderson who herself once broke into an abandoned building with terrifying results, the film starts out with a bang and only continues to climb the ladder of insanity and carnage flying about as it goes on.  Makeup effects of the possessed emitting a neon green glow with contact lenses on the eyes, yes, will remind a few of Linda Blair’s demon child in The Exorcist but you hardly care as you’re watching.
 
Performance wise, Megahn Perry as the goth girl, Coolio and Bill Moseley being themselves and the main lead played by Joanna Canton are good, but its horror veteran Adrienne Barbeau who completely steals the show.  That said, the real stars of this crazy, occasionally irreverent thing are the visual effects artists who serve up a wide variety of onscreen slayings that briefly earned the film an NC-17.  Though some elements of the film are indeed dated including a gay Satanist whose effeminate nature is played for awkward laughs, overall this will give indie horror die-hards the unholy bloodbath they’ve been looking for.

 
Despite a solid midnight screening at Sundance, the floor dropped out from under The Convent when its distributor folded and it found itself languishing in bootleg purgatory for almost two years.  While being an obvious Evil Dead II clone crossed with Demons in how the demonic possessions spread like a viral outbreak, The Convent will still give horror fans keen on leaving their brain at the doorstep a swell, funky time at the movies.  Though sadly still out of print on tape and DVD, this new 4K digital file from Multicom should satisfy horror fans by giving this lean mean indie a new skin.  Fingers crossed the folks at Vinegar Syndrome are listening in for new ideas for forthcoming disc releases.

--Andrew Kotwicki