The Church (1990)

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

If The shining, Rosemary's Baby, and The Little Shop of Horrors (original) had a baby you would have The Church. The shining in that every aspect of every shot is a part of a deeper Freudian symbolic story that is uncanilly terrifying IF it hooks you. Rosemary's Baby in that much of the cinematography is remeniscant of Rosemary's baby and their are many explicit references to Rosemary's baby and The Shining. The little shop or horrors in that this film is a masterpiece of campiness. This film is incredibly esoteric and deeply rooted in psychoanalytic theory, lacanian theory to be specific. One doesn't need to know psychoanalytic theory to pick it up from the film IF it hooks you in But it may take a basic understanding of lacanian concepts for it to hook you in.

A church built on the site of a medieval massacre is being restored. The Teutonic Knights had killed all the villagers for mere suggestions of demonic spirits. New librarian Evan and Lisa uncover a piece of parchment. As Evan digs, he gets possessed by something buried underneath. Lotte is a young girl interested in their work with the catacombs. Her father Hermann also gets possessed. An ancient alarm is activated and the doors to the church are locked trapping a tour group of children and a wedding photo shoot.There are lots of interesting visual concepts. The plot is a mess. It meanders without tension. There is nothing scary about this horror but it is compelling visually. Someone should work out simple expositions to explain the story. I am willing to excuse some of it as translation problems.

This late-era Italian horror shows it's bigger budget by giving us a lengthy flashback involving a bunch of knights tracking down devil worshippers, wiping them out, burying them in a pit and then building a church on top of the corpses. They even kill a duck and chuck that in too, probably because they caught it listening to Slayer or something. And thus begins Michelle Soavi's The Church, starring that guy from the Phantom Menace, John "Giovanni" Morghen "Radice", and (sigh) Asia bloody Argento.In the present, the Church still stands, and some librarian guy who looks like David Cronenberg turns up there to begin his new job. He meets a restoration chick (and they hit it off), the wizened old priest guarding the secret in the basement (they hit it off too, or at least in the version in my brain), and (sigh) teenage weirdo Asia Argento, who in this stage of her career is already exhibiting the acting range of a sack of potatoes dunked in a bath full of mango jelly. She's the daughter of the caretaker, if you need to know why she's here at all. Also, Phantom Menace guy and John Morghen are also priests here. Judas Priests, breaking the law! Well, not really.Once some builders accidentally punch a hole through to the pit where those devil worshippers were buried, things start getting weird. People start hearing ghost horses. The librarian guy starts acting all possessed and in turn causes the caretaker to go insane and impale himself on a pneumatic drill. After about an hour of this Soavi introduces about a million new characters and then traps everyone in the church, which I thought would build up to a Demons style massacre, but I was wrong.What you get instead is various characters meeting their demise in certain surreal ways. A bride to be sees herself as an old woman and tears her face to bits. Two photographers try and find a way out by spelunking (just like Alien 2!) only to end up meeting a subway train face on. The restoration lady finds herself up for a sacrifice and Phantom Menace guy is left to try and reverse all the demonic action. Also, there's a great scene of bodies rising from the ground all twisted together to resemble a huge demon head.But I've kind of got a problem with this film, and I don't know what it is. I think it may be because there's no huge pay off at the end, perhaps because there's so many characters to keep track of, or it might be because Soavi is a very talented and competent director and therefore there's a distinct lack of cheese and randomness that say, Bruno Mattei or even Fulci would have in their films, but I found the Church to be a bit unsatisfying. In fact, I think the problem might be that Soavi was aiming too high and kind of stopped short from getting there, when I compare it to the last two Italian films I watched (Deodato's haunted phone film Dial Help and Fulci's slasher/mong movie Touch of Death – now there's aiming low).You might like it though. Visually, it's a blast. It's all personal opinion, innit? I liked Dellamorte Dellamore and even Stagefright, so I'm not sure what I'm missing here.

Church, The (1989) ** (out of 4) This Michele Soavi film was originally intended to be the third entry in the DEMONS series, which producer Dario Argento has started up with director Lamberto Bava. For whatever reason the title was changed but it's easy to see how this could be considered the third film. In this movie, we start off hundreds of years in the past when a group of Knights attack a village of Satan worshipers and bury them. Years later a church is built over them and it doesn't take long until their spirits come out of the ground and possess people who then go on a killing spree. THE CHURCH has been built up pretty highly in some crowds as I've read reviews calling it one of the best Italian horror films out there and I've even read a few reviews stating that this is far beyond anything Argento has ever done. I can't say I agree with any of those opinions and when the end credits started to role I couldn't help but feel disappointed because while there's some nice eye candy I can't get over the fact that this movie goes on way too long and not much ever really happens. I think the opening sequence showing the attack on the Satan worshipers was beautifully filmed and there was some nice atmosphere to go along with it. Sadly, everything that follows is pretty weak and a lot of the blame has to go towards the screenplay, which never comes together. I guess we can overlook the fact that the story makes absolutely no sense because to be fair very few of these type of Italian films ever made sense. The problem is that there's nothing to the screenplay and you just sit there for over an hour without anything happening. Director Soavi is able to build up some atmosphere and there's some nice cinematography but this doesn't cover up all the warts. The story goes absolutely nowhere and when it finally starts up you'll be too bored to care about anything going on. The final thirty-minutes has a group of people getting trapped inside the church as the demons begin to attack. Those expecting to see the gore of the DEMONS series are going to be really disappointed as there's not too much of the red stuff. The majority of the cast members are strictly by-the-numbers with the exception of Asia Argento who is quite impressive in her scenes. At over 100-minute it's fair to say that at least twenty-minutes should have been cut out. THE CHURCH might be respected in some circles but I found it to be an incredibly over hyped and boring affair.