Also known in the US under the more prosaic title of The Devil’s Daughter, The Sect saw flashy director Michele Soavi continue to work under the protective wing of Italian horror maestro, Dario Argento, after the barely controlled insanity of 1989s The Church. But while The Church was a more, full bloodied, monstrous, body count movie (it originally started life as a second Demons sequel), The Sect was intended to be something a lot more sinister and subtle in nature.
Now, being subtle in an American horror film and being subtle in an Italian horror film from the early 90s are two very different things and while Soavi third piece of work in the genre didn’t go as far as having a pregnant woman torn in two by an owl-masked madman (Stage Fright) or having the head of an emerging Satan formed out of the bodies of a massacred village rise out of the ground, The Sect is just as deliriously batshit as you’d expect from filmmakers who treat logic and realism as merely as a suggestion rather than the norm.
Lonely, lowly kindergarten teacher Miriam Kreisi lives a simple life in Frankfurt, Germany with her pet rabbit, blissfully ignorant of news reports of murders apparently being committed by groups of Satan worshipers that are steadily becoming a problem. However, Miriam’s painfully empty life gets kicked up a notch when she almost accidently runs down an old man on a country road her her home and in an act of kindness, she brings the shaken old codger home. The man’s name is Moebius Kelly and aside from his obviously eccentric behavior, he claims he has a lot of work to do, but must rest first – but that night, we find that his “work” involves Miriam and his first order of business is to produce a rare beetle that promptly scurries up her nose while she sleeps. Next up, he feigns choking in order to send his would-be benefactor racing out of the house to get a doctor, and while she’s gone, he opens up a secret passage in her basement that leads to a sinister sub-basement that contains a sinister looking well.
By now, the more observant among you have probably guessed that old Moebius isn’t exactly on the up and up and is, in fact, an elder of one of those Satanic sects the news was warning about and is enacting some plan that obviously has Miriam at the centre.
From here, matters take a hard right turn into crazy town as one bizarre thing after another starts afflicting Miriam and the people around her as she not only starts suffering terrible dreams and starts leaking larvae from her ears, but her close friend falls into a trance and causes her own death after being smothered by a possessed piece of cloth. Elsewhere, the sect roll into town and start enacting rituals that involve ripping the faces off people with hooks and it’s all tied to the destiny that’s inexorably tied to a Miriam who remains as clueless as we ate about the whole damn thing.
While I’ve waxed lyrical about the trippy nature of Italian horror movies before, Michele Soavi’s The Sect manages to set a virtually incoherent precedent not seen since the brain boiling days of Lucio Fulci’s indecipherable Manhattan Baby or Giulio Paradisi’s endlessly confounding The Visitor. While The Sect maybe isn’t quite as baffling as the two movies I just name dropped, I’m willing to bet it will cause more than a few faces to scrunch up with confusion and for best results, it’s advisable not to question why or how anything is happening and solely focus on the what.
Once you do that and simply just accept what “is”, the movie opens up to flood you with a healthy stream of perplexing set pieces that assault your senses in a way that recalls Argento at his most random. Serial horror victim Mariangela Giodano is almost suffocated by a sentient demonic handkerchief and later, under a evil influence, entices a one-night-stand to stab her to death; later, the devil worshipers bring an expired Moebius back to life by ripping off the facial features of a drugged sacrifice with some Hellraiser-y type tools and placing her removed visage over the Satanic coffin dodger’s face; and perhaps most puzzling of all, Miriam is eventually raped by a demonic entity which puzzlingly takes the form of a malevolently amorous stork.
However, as aggressively random as The Sect is, there’s never a sense that Soavi doesn’t have a solid grip on the fever dream-like material (whatever the fuck it may supposed to signify) and his typically swooping, light footed and – yes – Argento-esque camerawork highlights the exaggerated nature of the film rather well, be it having the screen zip around the pipe work of an entire house when Miriam turns on a tap or switch to the point of view of Miriam’s strangely scene stealing rabbit.
While characterization in a film like The Sect is hardly a priority, Kelly Curtis (sister of Jamie Lee) projects enough innocent vulnerability to attract a million, interested devil worshipers like moths drawn to a flickering bulb and certainly earns her pay thanks to the numerous, uncomfortable positions the story places her in. Whether being winched into the well while trussed up like a turkey or having a hole pecked into her throat by a giant bird, she runs the gauntlet of short occurrences until she manages to turn the tables in the impressive, but predictably confusing, climax. Also adding to the rubbery feel of reality is the appearance of good old Herbert Lom who, after a career spent playing oddballs and twitching an eye at Inspector Clouseau, fills the screen with twitches and tics as the sect’s elder, Moebius.
However, much like The Church, Soavi’s The Sect stumbles when stacked up against his other horror titles such as the wildly flamboyant slasher, Stage Fright, and the surreal, sublime comedy of Dellamorte Dellamore. Also – as is standard when discussing esoteric Italian frighteners – the fact that large swathes of it deliberately make no logical sense simply will whizz over the heads of many casual viewers like a possessed piece of cloth as they struggled to work out the continuing relevance of Miriam’s rabbit.
Nicely trippy and containing numerous memorable scenes, the sum of The Sect’s parts are ultimately greater than its whole and while it’s got plenty of atmosphere, newbies to the euro-horror scene may find it oddly vapid and lacking some serious Sect appeal.
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