This is yet another movie that I’ve been trying to finish watching for about 15 years. It’s not such a terrible movie, it’s just that I always seem to put it on at night and then fall asleep, and in my defense this movie has stuff happening in the prologue, and then not much for about half the movie. So I finally finished it the night before last. As usual, I have some stuff to say that has little to do with the movie. But first, a synopsis.

In the Middle Ages, some knights with helmets covering their faces and bedsheets on their horses chase some women and children around and kill them in nasty ways, then bury them in a big pit and put a cross over the top. They then build a church over the top of that to keep the souls of the vulnerable people they just murdered from coming to get them Barbara.

My first extraneous thought is that I wonder if the horses are complicit in all this. There’s something so scary to me about the horses wearing sheets, especially in those old Blind Dead movies. My second is that I’m so glad I’m not a religious fanatic, because aside from them harming people all the time as they have since antiquity and still do, you almost have to feel sorry for them because they’re afraid of everything that’s not themselves. How awful would it be, to be a giant man wearing armor, and you’re so scared of a teenage girl who’s looking up at you begging you not to kill her that you have to crush her skull with your one hand that’s wearing a metal glove? And then hunt down and trample with your horse a 14 year old Asia Argento who is running away with no protection but a basket over her face?

Since I brought up Asia Argento I have to add that this is an Argento production directed by Michele Soavi, who was an actor in a lot of Italian movies including The Gates of Hell in which he vomited up his guts, Demons in which he gave the girls the movie tickets on the subway as well as appearing in the film within the film, A Blade in the Dark in which he spoilers, and a host of other ways he expired before becoming a director and ultimately helming his best regarded film Cemetery Man. The Church was rumored by Lamberto Bava to have begun its life as Demons 3, a fact which Soavi and Argento dispute. But it pretty much is Demons 3, with generally more scenery and less action than the first two movies.

Back to the movie, Asia Argento lives in the church in the present day because her parents work there, but she’s always sneaking out to go and drink and smoke in a club that lets 14 year olds in. I as a fellow 14 year old in 1989 would have been super jealous of her wardrobe, especially these black and white striped tights she wears out, though I wondered how she got such haute couture when her parents were working in squalor in this gross old church. No matter what, it’s way better than wearing a basket to hide from the Spanish Inquisition. There’s also a woman restoring a painting, which is a plot point that was used to good effect in both Who Saw Her Die and Don’t Look Now, so why not. And there’s a newly hired scholar played by the guy who flirts with Whitney Houston at a party to make Kevin Costner jealous in The Bodyguard, and a priest who’s been in everything including most recently an episode of the British murder mystery show McDonald and Dodds which has a much more intricate plot than The Church. I keep meaning to do a post about that show.

Anyway, there’s a painting and a piece of a manuscript that holds the clue to how to defeat the demons that aren’t there yet when the manuscript is found, and the scholar goes messing around in the basement and the cross falls into a bottomless hole and he gets possessed, and then slowly lots more people get possessed but with minimal to no transformation into demons and the movie puts various victims in the church because it’s a tourist destination. There are obnoxious school kids who get scratched by demons and switch faces, and a group of people doing a fashion shoot with wedding dresses but pretending they’re actually getting married which ends up with the field trip teacher getting impaled by a wrought iron gate, and some really unpleasant older people who might be confused because why else are they trying to talk on landline phones that are in the church.

I guess the best comparison to the Demons movies is that there’s a young couple who ends up crawling through a tunnel to get away when something gruesome and actually kind of impressive happens. And the old people who are married but hate each other, she ends up somehow ripping his head off and using it to ring the church bell. There’s a guy who saves the day and gets killed in the process, though he’s not a pimp or a gym instructor, but a priest.

And then right in the middle of the end of the movie, a giant goat man fucks the woman who is restoring the painting while a bunch of possessed people or demon or something watch in a definite Rosemary’s Baby “homage,” and my mind goes to the similar scene in Black Candles, and I think, “It’s all fun and games until someone fucks a goat.” And then I start wondering, why do we say, “it’s all fun and games until…” which surely must be a quote from some 80s cop show, right? So I had to stop the movie and look it up and according to The Internet, it’s a phrase that actually originated in Ancient Rome when they had wrestling matches where the only rule was that you couldn’t rip out your opponent’s eye. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

Anyway, remember how I said that Asia Argento kept sneaking out of the church? This conveniently leaves her the only person alive at the end of the movie to be standing over the mass grave that the church has once again become, which bookends the film nicely because she was the last person standing in the prologue too. But of course, Demons the series which this movie is totally not a part of is never over.

I know this post is a mess, but so is the movie. It’s a collection of images more than anything, which is what we want from Italian horror, and it’s miles above most of what the industry was putting out in 1989, but it’s not interesting enough to be great, and not ridiculous enough to be riffworthy. Though of course we did make fun of it, especially the music, because someone was playing the organ in what sounded like “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” in a minor key. This movie doesn’t really deserve mockery. The Church is for the ride or die fans of what Soavi has been quoted as calling “pizza schlock,” and you know who you are. Bad pizza schlock is still pizza schlock.