31 Days of Halloween (Day 30) - The Church AKA Demons 3 AKA WTF?

In 1985, Lamberto Bava showed that Italian horror films were still capable of kicking you in the teeth with the surreal demonic possession splatter flick Demons. Set in a West Berlin cinema, Demons has a group of filmgoers being slaughtered by an ever increasing number of demonic creatures, possibly generated by the film being show. It doesn't make any sense, but it does have a lot of arresting images and a breakneck pace. Demons 2 is closely related, showing what happens to a hermetically sealed apartment complex when a demon emerges from a TV set and starts infecting people with it's evil. While not as good as the original, it is still pretty neat.

This kind of thing is never good.

The Church, officially is a sequel, but has nothing to do with the first two films, except for dealing with demons. Starting in the Middle Ages with a group of Teutonic Knights butchering a coven of witches, the film quickly moves to the modern day (1989). A church has been built over the mass grave of the witches. While the church is undergoing restoration work, the new church librarian, Evan (Tomas Arana) breaches a seal in the crypt, unleashing the evil trapped underneath.

The next day a group of members of the restoration team, a bunch of tourists and some fashion photographers and models are trapped in the church. The demons start to possess some of the people - spreading like a disease that causes hallucinations and violent, aberrant behavior - while others are killed off. Unlike the non-stop action of the first two Demons films, The Church builds slowly and never achieves their kinetic fierceness.

The face of evil...a bad trip...or a bit of both?

Finally, Father Gus (Hugh Quarshie whose character has little screen time and no development before the third act, at which point he becomes the hero) figures out a way to collapse the church with a mechanism built into the structure when it was constructed as a fail-safe device. He does so in time to stop the spread of the demonic forces to the outside world. Or does he? There is a predictable twist ending, with the one survivor (Asia Argento) coming back to pay respects to her dead parents and unleashing the evil again. Or something like that. The end.

Although the movie suffers from a weak script, poor characterization and a story that leaves a lot of questions unanswered, it is still a pretty good horror movie. There are some neat images. The demons look cool - a standout is a scene in which art historian Lisa is having sex with a very classic looking devil (reptilian skin, horns, bat wings, horse head). Like many such scenes in the movie, it is weird and lyrical and audacious. Unfortunately, most of the movie is like this; provocative images strung together with a dumb story and weak acting.

It is worth watching, if only to see some the set-pieces and tableaux the creative team came up with. Just don;t expect a story that operates on any level other than dream logic.