One church you don't want to visit

Last week I talked about Stagefright by Michele Soavi, and today we're talking about The Church also by Michele Soavi.

The Church (1989) is a beautiful mess of a film. The plot in a nutshell is this:

Back in medieval days, a force of Teutonic Knights are called to cleanse a village of evil. They do this by indiscriminately slaughtering every living thing around and burying all the corpses in a pit which is sealed with a big stone cross. A priest instructs them to erect a great church on the site to trap the evil in the pit forever. Cut to 1989. The evil is released and everything goes pear-shaped.

The actors aren't bad, some like Hugh Quarshie (Father Gus) went on to play the Captain of the Guard for Queen Amidala in Star Wars Phantom Menace. The bishop is played by Feodor Chaliapin Jr. who essentially reprises his role from The Name of the Rose. Young Lotte is played by Asia Argento.

To be perfectly honest, this movie is a great example of style over substance. The shots are great and the sound and music are topnotch.

The biggest problems are the script and the cutting. Several smaller scenes make no sense and the dialogue is almost pointless. The pacing is also a bit odd, but not so much as to really make a difference. It feels like as if a group of people sat around and pitched cool scenes with the script built around those scenes as an excuse to make a film. In most cases this would be catastrophic, but Soavi pulls it off nicely. The movie is mostly like a dream with soft shots and muted lighting that never goes too dark to be watchable. Many modern directors could take note here. After all, what's the point of watching a movie if it's too dark to see what's happening?

Most of the special effects are good and still hold up quite well. Whether you like the rubber demons that pop up here and there is up to you, but the final monster, that is built of squirming human bodies is still quite impressive.

Interestingly, they wanted to shoot the movie in and around the Nuremberg cathedral but the city decided they didn't want a horror movie filmed there. The church is actually The Matthias Church in Budapest, or the The Church of the Assumption of the Buda Castle (Hungarian: Nagyboldogasszony-templom) to use it's full name.

Although the real church is not a cathedral, the one in the movie is. My question is; how did they build a great cathedral, which requires a substantial foundation to be dug out, without unearthing the pit of evil underneath?

A silly little nitpick to be sure, and considering that this rather cool horror movie is all about style over substance, it doesn't matter.

At the end of the day, The Church is a movie I would recommend to horror fans but not really to casual horror watchers. It's not a masterpiece but it is a fun curiosity.

That's that an all that. Join me again next time and have yourself a great week!