Michele Soavi

  • La chiesa [The Church] (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • Dellamorte Dellamore [Cemetary Man] (1994)

    Dellamorte Dellamore [Cemetary Man] (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) There’s a delicate balance between weird and too weird when it comes to horror comedies, and Dellamorte Dellamore doesn’t always get the mixture right, even if it keeps trying new things up to the very end. What starts as a zombie comedy with a jaded graveyard-keeper dealing with the undead menace as it sporadically pops up eventually becomes a disjointed, always-changing comedy of death and lust, with unpredictable plot shifts every fifteen minutes or so. The same actress plays different characters, the lead character becomes a serial killer unable to be seen as a suspect by the police, and those aren’t the weirdest things in a film that ends by questioning the identity of two characters and the very reality in which they live. It’s a lot to process if you’re paying attention (perhaps even more if you’re not), but what helps the film cohere more than its scattered parts is the strong visual quality of director Michele Soavi’s work, far more interesting than most movies of the time (and even today)—Despite the surreal nature of the script, there’s nearly always something interesting to watch, not the least of which being a quasi Bruce-Campbellian quality to lead actor Rupert Everett’s work as the graveyard keeper. The quirky humour also keeps things interesting on another register, giving Dellamorte Dellamore a far more substantial feel than emptier horror films. It’s not much of an exaggeration to pair it with something like Army of Darkness, although it’s substantially more violent and lustful than many comparable movies.