This movie confuses me, on several levels. I'd been aware of it for many years and wanted to see it for just as long (mainly due to a single image I'd seen of the film of bodies piled on one another until they looked just like a horned head), but it was very difficult to track down. Then a few weeks ago I finally found somewhere to watch it, and the accompanying info informed me that it was considered a "sequel" to Demons and Demons 2. Well I like those films, so I went into The Church looking forward to it even more. And then the film seemed to have very little to do with the previous two Demons films, in both style and plot, which left me feeling distinctly unfulfilled (the cinematic equivalent of blue balls, perhaps?). And now IMDB tells me that it's not a sequel to the Demons films but Wikipedia says that it is, and in the end I'm just left feeling cheated that I didn't get to see a demon horse.
We start with a flashback in which a village of people who may or may not be demons (one of them has a cross-shaped wound on the sole of her foot, but she's the only one we see with that mark) get slaughtered by a group of Tutonic Knights. These knights are in such a hurry to bury the massacred villagers before they can allegedly rise again that when one of their number falls into the burial pit, horse and all, they just bury them along with the rest of the bodies. Jumping to the present day, we find that a large Gothic church has been built on top of the burial pit (apparently to keep the demons from escaping). A new librarian arrives to catalogue the church's old books and scrolls, and discovers the secret in the catacombs of the church - letting the demonic spirits out. Eventually a whole bunch of people get locked inside the church, hallucinations, possessions and general insanity ensues, and it's left to one priest to save the day by finding the secret spot built into the church that will bring it all down before the demons escape.
First of all, if you go into this film thinking it's a direct sequel to Demons and Demons 2 (as I did) then you'll likely come out disappointed that The Church is nowhere near as gorily wet as those two films. There's some gore, yes, and some trippy demonic imagery, certainly, but stylistically it really is nothing like those previous two films. Director Michele Soavi has stated that he didn't want The Church to be connected to the Demons films, even though it was originally written as being connected (he's also not been the most complementary about those films, which makes me feel slightly awkward knowing he was assistant director on the first Demons film and knowing some of his other work of that time period, but he has made a name for himself beyond these films so fair play to him). Instead, it's got a much more nightmare-like quality to it; one part The Devils and one part Rosemary's Baby (certainly by the final act). The lack of overt gore (for the most part) and clawed demons oozing pus roaming the church makes both the characters and the audience question just what is going on and whether it is actually real, meaning that is certainly more of an "intellectual" horror than most of the other films it might find itself alongside.
But the film leaves too many unanswered questions. There's an implication of reincarnation in the plot - we see Asia Argento playing a young girl in both the medieval prologue and the present-day setting - but it's never really referenced or played with in the film other than there. Were the medieval villagers really demons, or did the knights' unjust massacre of them end up sealing their fates and opening the door to the demons? Maybe that's something we're supposed to come to our own conclusions about - The Church certainly isn't setting out to praise the Catholic Church. And my final, personal, complaint - when I saw that horse getting buried alive in the prologue, I was expecting at least a Tombs of the Blind Dead moment with a skeletal horse roaming the church, if not an outright demonic one. And yet all I got were ghostly hoofbeats a few times. I feel like I was cheated out of my Chekov's Demonic Horse, and was that really too much to ask?
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