In an alternate timeline, Dario Argento – the Italian master of horror – and Michele Soavi – the man responsible for the magnificently flamboyant 80s slasher Stage Fright – gave us an official, third installment in the brutally awesome Demons franchise as they merged their distinctive talents to continue to make the world of Eurohorror a more gloriously fucked-up place.
However, during the developmental process, Soavi realised that he didn’t particularly want to follow smash-mouth, heavy metal stylings of Lamberto Bava’s cult, feral gorefests and instead fancied doing something a bit more “sophisticated”. What we got instead was The Church, a trippily violent slice of satanic panic that took the basic premise of a Demons movie (bunch of randos trapped in a single location while pure evil does its thing) and over complicated it to the point of incoherence. Let us pray.
Way back, in Medieval Germany, a cluster of Teutonic Knights who happen upon a village of supposed devil worshipers do exactly what you’d expect a gang of sword waving, God fearing men would do – slaughter the living shit out of them, bury the bodies in a mass grave and build a church over the top of it, just to make sure.
Of course, evil like that never truly stays down for the count forever and in the present day, the cathedral’s new librarian and an artist supervising the restoration of some murals stumble on the building’s shocking secrets as they attempt to get into one another’s pants. However, while artist Lisa is somewhat vary, librarian Evan jumps right in, obsessively searching the unstable catacombs for a “stone with seven eyes” detailed in a piece of found parchment. In a textbook case of “be careful what you wish for”, Evan succeeds in his search and his reward is the unleashing of a hell of a lot of trippy shit. While Evan himself becomes enthralled by an ancient evil which he promptly spreads to the church sacristan, both Lisa and the kindly priest, Father Gus, all start having spooky visions that alert them that something biblical is about to go down.
It’s eventually triggered by the possesed sacristan committing suicide with an industrial jackhammer (yep, you read that right) and the entire building suddenly rocks a mechanism that barricades all the doors and windows, trapping a disparate group of people inside including a school trip, an eccentric elderly couple, a bickering pair of teens and a group taking wedding photos, the evil grows in strength, infecting everyone within and soon enough, blood begins to flow.
Suspecting that the church’s grumpy Bishop knows more than he’s letting on, Father Gus tries to undo the evil before it leaks out of the contained building an infects the whole world with a Satanic whammy, while impalings, face tearing and randy goat monsters unfold in the background.
The Church pretty much delivers everything you’d hope to see in a 1980s Italian horror film, dishing out a dreamy tone, inventive gore, whirling camerawork and nightmare logic aplenty in order to create a film that refuses to make a lick of sense, however, while watching Soavi’s follow up to Stage Fright, I can help mourn the film that might have been, rather than celebrate the film we actually got. The fact that Soavi didn’t want to make a traditional Demons sequel feels extra frustrating when you remember that he’s actually in the first film as the masked dude who’s handing out the fateful cinema passes, but while you can respect his wishes to stay true to himself, watching those fanged, clawed, green-dribbling bastards stalk people in a sealed-up church would have been a fucking gas.
The first problem with The Church, is that John Carpenter pretty much nailed its entire concept a mere two years earlier with the vastly superior Prince Of Darkness that tells virtually the exact same story (pure evil escapes from a specially built church and fucks up everyone trapped within), but swung for the fences by infusing it with techno-religious speak in an attempt to scientifically quantify good and evil into tangible elements. In comparison, Soavi’s film feels horribly inconsequential as it lacks the necessary character and momentum to make any of its elements gripping beyond a pulpit-full of whacked-out imagery.
However, said imagery is so whacked-out that it sometimes doesn’t actually matter if the movie can’t manage to lasso them into something that’s a little more substantial and you can see the seed of potential blossoming that would eventually bloom into the stirring visuals of 1994s Delamorte Delamore (aka. Cemetery Man). We start with a small army of knights decending upon a village in dreamy slow motion that sees a severed head get bounced between a horse’s hooves like a polo ball and an escaping teen getting obliterated when their escape attempt sees them left hanging in the path of a speeding subway train; but once the demonic seal is broken, things get really batshit. Aside from the aforementioned suicide-by-jackhammer and a nasty throat impalement that is never really addressed despite it happening in front of a crowd of witnesses, things get really surreal as we hurtle toward the nihilistic climax. A female character is raped by an impressive looking, goat-headed demon that sneers at its acolytes through a cleft pallet maw; flashback reveal the horrible torment, Clive Barker-esque the building’s architect is put through in order to provide the cathedral with a self destruct device (all good churches should have one, apparently); and most impressive of all, the head of Satan himself, formed from all the bodies of the Medieval-set massacre, rises from a crack in the floor to snarl at a terrified Father Gus. It’s genuinely top notch stuff, it’s just a shame the movie takes so long to get to it as the middle section of the plot painfully drags its cloven hoofs in order to get to the good stuff in half the time.
It also doesn’t help that the cast are so thinly sketched, a light summer’s breeze would send them twirling around the church’s steeple like a runaway kite. The leads are merely avatars the plot uses to either get things in motion or finish things off and you can’t help but long for the broad, fun caricatures of a Demons movie to camp things up a little while reality bloodily goes tits up and not even the Bishop’s absurdly curly eyebrows can anchor matters.
As a standard serving of spaghetti horror, The Church certainly has Soavi’s natural flair which guarantees more than it’s fair share of memorable moments, but while the nightmare logic of Italian frighteners usually adds to the ambiance, here it ultimately just proves to be confusing as hell.
Faint praise.
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