Worth: $5.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Alice Orr-Ewing, Joe Doyle, Eveline Hall, Peter Mensah
Intro:
A pastiche of religious horror that almost feels like a seventh instalment of the Scary Movie franchise, except that any laughs to be had are entirely unintentional.
During the turn of the millennium, a slew of big-screen battles between angels and demons emerged. The late ‘90s and early 2000s saw any number of films revolve around demonic possession and the threat that Satan and his cronies posed to humankind, from End of Days and Fallen, Dogma and Stigmata, all the way to Little Nicky. Christian mythology was the “It Girl” when it came to big screen baddies in a way we hadn’t seen since the heyday of The Omen and The Exorcist in the 1970s. What director Nathan Frankowski has constructed here feels like a decades-late entry into that same oeuvre that once held Gabriel Byrne’s career in a chokehold back in 1999.
The plot is undoubtedly attention-grabbing: there’s a breakthrough in cloning tech, DNA fragments are discovered on the Shroud of Turin, and an archangel arrives on Earth to put a stop to the unthinkable before it can fall into the wrong hands.
When Laura Milton (see what they did there?), an American art student played by Alice Orr-Ewing, accidentally witnesses the theft of the shroud along with the murder of her friend Father Marconi (Joe Doyle), that’s where things get complicated, and the logic-train leaves the tracks at breakneck speed.
What follows is a mishmash of every Christianity-themed plot you can imagine — Rosemary’s Baby, Gabriel, Paradise Lost, The Omen, it’s all there. A pastiche of religious horror that almost feels like a seventh instalment of the Scary Movie franchise, except that any laughs to be had are entirely unintentional.
Low budget special effects and uneven dialogue are unfortunate but not unforgiveable. The unashamed use of INXS’s “Devil Inside” warring on the radio with Real Life’s “Send Me an Angel” is painfully on the nose, but also hardly a crime. The true downfall is the jigsaw of a plot, trying to fit too much in without ever fully developing any one idea. Messy and convoluted, it makes the nearly 2 hour runtime feel like an eternity.
The movie might hold some appeal for those nostalgic for the millennium’s spiritual heyday, but if that’s the case we’d recommend rewatching Dogma and calling it a day.
