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user\nMaster of Italian horror Dario Argento is called a lot of bad things by non-fans. And is deserving of absolutely none of the backlash. In fact, every time I hear something bad about Argento- I think they're really talking about Michele Soavi. He just doesn't get the same amount of attention because his films were never as successful in theaters. In fact, his best film - 1994's Cemetery Man - was probably his least successful. Or just didn't get the attention he felt it deserved, because after that, he left film and went into directing television. He's never gone back. So people really don't know how inferior his other films are because by the time they've seen them, they're already fans of the Italian horror aesthetic. Which means you have to accept the fact that they make almost zero sense and are usually very unattractive films. This is where The Church stands out from the pack. Because visually, it's so cheap and ancient-looking, you can smell the dust. But it has its' charms too, though they are few. The camera-work is truly arresting and the music score is hugely elaborate and grand.
Since Argento is the reasons people have seen Soavi's work all, I don't know anyone who caught The Church before Argento's Suspiria and Deep Red. Soavi is a bit of a hack. Sort of like an Italian Mick Garris- the utmost example of a director preferring style over substance. The flaws of The Church are constant and plenty. The film opens with a somewhat interesting prologue showing knights on white horses charging through a peasant village akin to those you see in any Robin Hood adaptation, in some long-ago century. These scenes are intense enough, energetic, and get quickly to the point. Then, we cut to the present, where the film's style takes over. Yeah, the movie is okay to look at. And for about 35 or so minutes in the present, 1980's wherever-Italy, the movie is just interesting enough to get us to the slowly revealing horror elements. So now we know the purpose of the film is the build up of it's horror. And it's a decent build up, for the most part. But as the movie approaches the halfway point, we realize the movie's driving by, and... nothing is happening.
The plot is very simple. I think. Two people working in a church, one as a cataloger of books and the other as a restorer of the building's wall artwork, discover a scroll / scripture that the man thinks will lead them to some kind of buried treasure or priceless artifact that he can sell and get rich off of. So he follows his 'map' only to uncover a force underneath the church that has him hallucinate, while he's slowly becoming a demon who will make everyone else hallucinate. So while he is doing his demon-work, someone he passed the force onto kills himself in a manner that traps everyone in the church while the demon 'contagen' spreads onto everyone, leaving a Black preacher and the little girl who sneaks out of the church every night to go clubbing as the only 2 people who can stop the plague from spreading beyond the church walls. That probably sounds action-packed and Soavi's style is far more lethargic than Argento. But never before have I seen an attempted surrealist film this agonizingly boring. I kid you not. Absolutely nothing happens in the entire film! I've seen expressionistic (or impressionistic, I'm no film school super-grad) films before, but most of them actually show things happening (John Carpenter's Halloween for one).
It follows pretty closely in the footsteps of Lamberto Bava's Demons films (since Argento co-produced). We're shown to a location where a bunch of people gather, one turns into a demon, all the others are isolated, that person infects everyone except a couple survivors, then the demons either get out- infecting the world, or the survivors get out when the demons die. This film puts all those same elements in place. Except, unlike Argento's work, nothing happens. Okay, a few things do happen. But only one bizarre sequence has the panache of Lamberto's much more fun Demons films. A random woman's neck is impaled by a demon using a section of fence he rips out of the floor. What's bizarre about that, you wonder? It happens in front of about two dozen people. What do they do? Nothing. She dies, her head trickles blood in closeup. But all those people don't even notice, though it happens in plain view and no less than 8 feet away from them. Maybe 4 people notice the demon running up to stab anyone he can as he runs toward her, so they duck out of the way. She's killed and in the shot after she dies, everyone is just sitting around, being quiet while a boy plays a saxophone. I kid you not. That's what happens. That's more than logically incoherent- it's plain stupid.
The scene is suggesting that the woman just sort of disappears and no one saw her death. They all just up and forget about it. And this 15-second thing is absolutely the only event that takes place in the movie. I'm not saying it's the only violence, gore, or murder we see. It's not. It's just the only thing we can tell is happening. For example, in one scene a beautiful woman sees herself in a mirror looking old and ugly. She starts clawing the skin on her face off, but when she reappears minutes later- no scratches. People are devoured by fish and their faces are squashed by subway cars. But later they turn up as totally unharmed members of a possessed cult, in a scene that commits the ultimate horror heresy- copying a famous scene from Roman Polanski's 1968 masterpiece, Rosemary's Baby, the greatest horror film ever made, shot for shot. Even if Argento did that, I would be furious!
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