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Co-written and produced by horror icon Dario Argento The Church was originally slated to be part of his Demons franchise, but the director wanted it to be more of a standalone project and elements tying to the earlier films were excised from the script.

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A new librarian comes of a German cathedral built on the site of a massacre of witches with the mass grave beneath to the building and along with an artist restoring artwork with the church stumble upon its ancient secrets releasing the evil it has suppressed.

Despite the re-write at the insistence of director Michele Soavi The Church bears many of the hallmarks of an Argento story. Events follow one another in a sequence but there is actually little cause and effect to the unfolding story creating the sense that things ‘just happen.’ It takes the movie quite a while to get going with much of the front half a dreary slog that neither establishes mood no explores or illuminates character. The second half is a succession of lesser characters facing and dying in strange and inexplicable manners as the evil forces from beneath the church grow.

The Church, for a religiously themed horror, lacks any real sense of morality or even message. The massacre in the opening makes the knights seem quite sadistic and evil but the power from the witches is equally brutal without cause or reason. In this manner the movie much like Argento’s work in general, set-up for elaborate ‘kills’ but lacking in a cohesive plot or narrative.

I have yet to find an Argento guided project that really works for me and The Church is simply another piece that mostly bored me.