The Church (Michele Soavi, 1989)

Italian filmmaker Michele Soavi has worked in television for most of his career, but he built his reputation as a director with a handful of nutty horror films in the late '80s and early '90s, most of which were collaborations with Dario Argento, and he was an actor before he became a director, working for some of the biggest names in Italian horror (Argento, Umberto Lenzi, Lucio Fulci, Joe D'Amato, Lamberto Bava, Ruggero Deodato, Luigi Cozzi).

Soavi's most well-known horror film was also his last, Cemetery Man, a unique spin on the zombie movie that is one of the most effective hybrids of comedy and terror since Evil Dead 2. His other forays into the genre include slasher film StageFright, The Devil's Daughter aka The Sect (a decent Satanic cult movie with a memorably creepy opening scene), a documentary about Argento, and The Church, the second Catholic-themed horror movie I've reviewed on this site in a row.

The Church, co-written and produced by Argento and co-starring Argento's daughter Asia, opens with a lengthy Crusades-set scene in which Teutonic knights chase down, slaughter, and bury several villagers the knights claim to be demons. This period preamble is a bit clunky but reasonably entertaining, and despite the time it takes to set up the film's backstory, the audience is left with more questions than answers by the film's end, but you don't go to Italian horror for coherence. At least, I don't. The important thing is that a German cathedral (with Hungary standing in for Germany as a filming location) was built on top of the mass grave, and the cathedral's architect was killed and buried in his own creation because the church accused him of being an alchemist.

We jump to the present, and the movie grinds to a bit of a halt, aside from a few funny or inexplicable lines and character behaviors. This chunk of the film gives us the major players in the day-to-day life of the cathedral, much wandering in the catacombs below, a lot of secret parchment talk, and a relatively inert approach to pacing. (I'm a fan of a lot of Slow Cinema, but this part of the movie seems stuck in the mud.)

We're introduced to Lisa (Barbara Cupisti), a woman hired by the church to restore some frescoes, new church librarian Evan (Tomas Arana), a man who can't stop complaining about how many books he has to catalog (which got some good laughs from my archivist/librarian/records manager wife), the very old and very surly bishop (Feodor Chaliapin Jr.), the condescending reverend (Giovanni Lombardo Ridice), kindly Father Gus (Hugh Quarshie), and the sacristan Hermann (Roberto Corbiletto), his wife (Aline De Simone), and their daughter Lotte (Asia Argento), who is in her early teen years and getting rebellious. She's also the only one who knows a secret exit from the cathedral (this will be important later).

The movie sets up Lisa and Evan as the main protagonists, though they're a little underdeveloped and dull, but the movie really gets cooking when they become peripheral characters and Soavi focuses on the ensemble. The Church's second half delivers the weird shit, with all our main characters and a disparate group of people (a wedding party and their photographer, schoolkids and their teacher, a near-breakup young couple with motorcycle trouble, a hilariously dubbed elderly couple) trapped in the cathedral as demonic possession spreads like wildfire. The movie really picks up here (and a few scenes before), and we get lots of Argento-esque camera moves, creative deaths, Satanic shenanigans, and unpredictable strangeness. I wish the whole movie had this spirit and energy.

The Church was initially supposed to be the third film in Lamberto Bava's Demons trilogy, but, after much pre-production work, Bava lost interest and abandoned the movie. Inheriting the project, Soavi decided to turn it from a sequel into a standalone film, greatly revising the screenplay. I wish he'd revised the boring middle chunk even more, but he brings the heat otherwise.

The Church has its moments, but it's not as strong as the other Soavi films I've seen. I recommend it if you're a diehard Italian horror fan who's already seen the masterpieces or to anyone who wants to see a demon squeeze a lady's butt (that's all of us, right?). It's mostly a good time (except for the middle stretch), and the score is by Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Keith Emerson and soundtrack legends Goblin (though it's mid-tier work from both of them). I think it also needs to be mentioned that the soundtrack includes a song called "Go to Hell" by a band called Zooming on the Zoo. That's an impressively awful band name.