The Church (1990)

Great opening, created with a lot of people and a skilled mix of ghastly close-up and effective medium shots as horseback righteous folk thunder in to rid the place of undesirables, called witches. It is a powerful sequence that sets the tone of the film and remains potent throughout especially as repercussions and fall out from it begin to permeate the action. Less successful are the young romantic couple who are seemingly in different movies from each other because of the lack of credible script. the script inadequaced and lack of overall coherence threaten to ruin the film but such is the director's drive and ability to achieve imaginative effects we are overwhelmed by events despite the silly talk. The music of Philip Glass played by Goblins helps enormously and help make this an enjoyable watch. If only a bit more attention had been given to the storyline and script detail this would have been as good as the best of Argento - should mention his young daughter Asia puts in a marvellous performance.

Michele Soavi's follow-up to his superb slasher STAGE FRIGHT is this visually stimulating but ultimately confusing thriller about demons materialising in a church. Originally conceived as a sequel to the two DEMONS flicks, this one also has a group of people trapped in an isolated location and gradually getting turned into evil beings. However, the difference is that THE CHURCH is a much more complicated film; whereas DEMONS had a fairly linear plot, this one goes off in all directions in a series of disjointed scenes which are artistically wonderful. The problem is that as a whole this film feels a bit like the Frankenstein's Monster; it's a bunch of different sequences all sewn together in one incoherent bundle which makes little sense at the end.Things kick off in the promising opening which has a bunch of medieval knights slaughtering a gang of frightened villagers and kicking their severed heads through the mud. Unfortunately the film then cuts to the present day and it's another hour before anything else exciting happens. Until then we get some confusion about a newly-appointed librarian investigating a stone face in the floor of the crypt, where he has hallucinations. He cuts his hands open and gets a demonic voice, then turns back to normal and tries to rape a lover and cut open Asia Argento's stomach (!). It's as surreal as it sounds.Until the action begins we have a couple of breathtaking tracking shots which are definitely in Dario Argento's style; I feel he had a little more input than simply "producer" here. A Goblin score thumps away in the background, and together with some weird architectural gargoyle faces some atmosphere is produced. But too much time is spent with characters running about in dark corridors and not really doing much. The real fun begins when an intricate mechanism shuts the church door and traps everybody inside; people don't start turning into monsters, as you might think, but go insane instead and there's mass chaos.Some characters appear and disappear with little reasoning; none of them further the plot apart from providing some imaginative scenes of people being seduced by weird-looking monsters. These "demons" have the capacity to scare but are scarcely used. In one scene a naked woman gives herself to one of these monsters, it takes all sorts I guess. There is some nice gore thrown into the mess but not really that much considering; really only a few isolated but creative death scenes. One man pulls his own heart out of his chest (there's a novel cure for heartburn...) while another decides to commit suicide by jumping on to one of those concrete drills (I can think of less painful ways). Another person pulls their face off in a mirror in a scene heavily inspired by POLTERGEIST.A cool Euro-cast fill out the roles of the survivors; Barbara Cupisti (STAGE FRIGHT) provides the glamour content. An ancient-looking John Karlsen (THE SHE-BEAST) even turns up as a wizened old priest. THE CHURCH is an enterprising and imaginative film ruined only by a too-complex script which tries to weave too many plot strands together in too short a time. It's worth watching but will probably leave you wondering "What?".

The vast majority of movies from the late 80s look awful, and TC is no exception. Given that this silly Italian flick suffers from the usually host of darioargentonian flaws – silly plot-twists, occasionally amateurish performances, and weak and /or stupid dialog – the one thing that would have been a saving grace would have been impressive visuals. However, the bland, colourless, ugly 80s aura destroys any "eerie" mood this clumsily put together bundle of religious-horror clichés could have had. Argento is well-known (or at least should be) for his style-over-substance approach, i.e. his penchant to toy around with the camera and sets rather than spend time fixing his usually idiotic scripts full of bad logic and far-fetched situations. (This especially goes for his legendarily moronic thrillers.) Dazzling visuals were essentially this movie's only hope, but Argento fails to deliver even in that; supposedly his strong suit. The actors are mostly amateurs; in fact, most of them are so bad that Argento's 13 year-old daughter Asia (who is nothing to shout about talent-wise) comes off as a professional by comparison; even she has some clue how to play her scenes which can't be said for ANY of the actors in the anti-climactic church-destruction scenes. It is almost as if Argento gave acting roles to people who were at first merely recruited as extras. The dialogue is stilted and occasionally laughable even. The attempts at humour are badly timed, not to mention puerile. The demon costumes and make-up are so bad that even Ed Wood might have found fault with them. Dario trusted his make-up department so little that he rarely dared extend close-up shots of the demons to longer than half-a-second. He must have suspected that if he let the viewers see the demons for longer than that, they'd invariably laugh. (The viewers, not the demons.) It's a fine line between a B-movie and a shoddy-looking A movie; although, in this case, the "A" must stand for Argento, and not as a symbol of high quality.While the 1st half has a (small) measure of non-imbecility and non-dreariness, the 2nd half sees the plot and the movie disintegrate into amateurishness; this is when TC becomes a B-movie, for all practical purposes. In fact, I submit that had this exact same movie been made by a Hollywood and/or American director, its IMDb average would have been much lower. This serves as yet another example – and proof – that: 1) anything Argento touches, no matter how mediocre or outright bad, automatically gets overrated - simply because his name is in the credits, and 2) European films get far better critical treatment than American films. This astonishing – and fairly obvious – bias is a result of the special "bull aura" that European films and directors have (stemming from the flawed and frankly naïve belief that US films are commercial pap made by non-talents, whereas European ones are "artistic" and profound). This silly prejudice has been blinding film students and the more fanatical movie-goers for decades, often preventing them from objectively appraising either. This is why on IMDb you will sometimes see a great American movie rated only with a 6.0, while a fairly mediocre European movie might have a 8.0 average.Another major flaw of TC is that it gets rather dull in spots.

In the Middle Ages, the Knights Templar invade a supposed coven of witches and they slaughter the community. The dig an unholy collective grave, bury the bodies and build a church on the top of the corpses. On the present days, the ambitious librarian Evan (Tomas Arana) is hired to organize the books of the church. He meets the archaeologist Lisa (Barbara Cupisti) that is researching the catacombs of the church and he accidentally unleashes and is possessed by an ancient demon. Sooner several visitors are trapped inside the church and possessed by demons. Father Gus (Hugh Quarshie) and the teenager Lotte (Asia Argento) are the only persons that are not possessed, and Father Gus discovers a secret in the construction of the church that might be the last chance to save mankind."La Chiesa" is a great Gothic horror film with story of Dario Argento and his daughter Asia Argento in an important role. The plot is a prequel to Demons 1 and 2, and I saw this film for the first time on 17 February 2012 and today I have decided to watch it again. Unfortunately this film has not been released on DVD or Blu-Ray in Brazil and the image of the VHS awfully dubbed in English is poor and does not highlight the magnificent cinematography or the creepy special effects. The soundtrack has the music of Keith Emerson, Goblin and Philip Glass and completes this great film of demons. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "A Catedral" ("The Cathedral")Note: On 22 Jn 2017, I saw this film again on DVD, unfortunately dubbed in English.