La chiesa [The Church] (1989)

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2022). It’s a bad idea to place too much stock in expectations. In The Church’s case, it would have been easy to look forward to a gothic cathedral supernatural thriller featuring the involvement of both Argentos: Dario producing and writing, Asia co-starring. But keep those expectations in check (which isn’t all that difficult considering both Argentos’ steady fall from grace)—The Church occasionally works in small moments, interesting images and potential ideas, but falters in many crucial areas. The pacing is deathly slow, for instance—with far too much time spent explaining a historical prologue that’s not that interesting when measured against contemporary events. (This is a surprisingly common issue in staging elaborate historical flashbacks to show what could be a few lines of dialogue—they can work as supplemental visuals to audio, but it’s wasteful when they restage things without adding or contradicting anything said in the current day.)  While director Michele Soavi stages an acceptable amount of mayhem with characters going violently crazy under the influence of the cursed church, the film barely works itself up in a climactic frenzy: even the coda is depressingly ordinary. While The Church has enough good moments to avoid anything like a bad rating, it mishandles its own potential—considering how crazy and in-your-face the film gets about sacrilegious depictions of a Catholic cathedral, the film should have reached a feverish pace far earlier. Too bad—but then again, my expectations were modest.