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.
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.
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.
--Andrew Kotwicki