But. . .if you’re looking for a film with a coherent plot, logical characters speaking natural-sounding dialogue and competent acting, best pass this one up.
The Sect is a collaboration between greaseball horror/giallo legends Dario Argento and Michele (not the girl's name 'Michele' but the Italian boy's version of Michael) Soavi. Though the oddball film has the look and feel of 1970s Argento, it was filmed in 1991.
It might seem like I'm describing a terrible movie. It’s not. It’s not terrible. Of course, it’s not a movie, either. At least, not a conventional movie. Soavi and Argento are non-representational artists. Plot and character are like blotches of paint thrown on a canvas to provoke dread, fear, madness, etc. Instead of painting black and red squares or abstract patterns, Soavi and Argengto paint splotches of sex and violence.
The plot, as near as I could untangle from one viewing on Shudder, is as follows:
In a 1970 California desert a happy, carefree hippie commune is ritualistically slaughtered by a Satanic cult. CUT. About 20 years later we are in Frankfurt, Germany watching a lonely kindergarten teacher go about her dreary life. Driving home one day she nearly runs over an old bum. Feeling sorry for the shaken-up geezer, she invites him to rest up at her house (yes, of course, that is a stupid idea). The old bum speaks a lot of cryptic shit, then appears to fall asleep on her couch. The kindergarten teachers goes upstairs to her bedroom, talks to her pet rabbit and plays with a snow globe before she, too, falls asleep. But the old bum was just faking being asleep! He creeps upstairs, goes into the kindergarten teacher's bedroom, lightly molests her and injects a beetle into her nose (of course, she never comes close to waking up). While the newly beetle-infested teacher slumbers on, the old bum goes down to a barely-hidden basement temple which the kindergarten teacher has somehow never stumbled upon even though it's about the size of St. Peter's Basilica and contains a well(?!?!) which apparently goes all the way down to Hell and in which swims some sort of devilish creature that oozes some sort of sperm or something that will be used to impregnate the kindergarten teacher and birth the anti-Christ. OK. Meanwhile, one supposes because of the beetle in her nose, the kindergarten teacher has a horrible nightmare about the stork (the same stork which will eventually rape her). This nightmare wakes her up, she hears some clattering from downstairs, whereupon she discovers the old bum, now back upstairs, has seemed to pass out or die on her living room floor. She can't telephone for help because the old bum has does some stuff which renders her phone useless, so she drives over to a neighbor doctor's house and convinces the doctor to come back to her house and look at the bum. CUT. Sometime prior to the previous cut we've also had the scene where the pick-pocket gets the surprise of his life with the human heart. He steals it from the pocket of a cult member who has just cut it out from some lady's chest. This does nothing to advance the plot, and, in fact, hard as it is to believe, only muddles it, but it's too cool of a scene not to leave in. CUT. The kindergarten teacher and the doctor go back to the teacher's house, and, surprise, the old bum is nowhere to be seen. We get the inevitable "but, I tell you, he was there!" scene. CUT. From here the plot starts to get weird. Haha. But no, at least from this point forward the viewer understands the old bum is part of the Satanic cult, and the cult believes the kindergarten teacher is the Chosen One to birth the anti-Christ, and so we have some sort of plot line to hang on to while weird stuff happens involving the kindergarten teacher's rabbit, Turin-like shrouds, the stork rape, random murders and even a suicidal zombie. CUT TO SPOILER. Eventually the cult succeeds in impregnating the kindergarten teacher and the anti-Christ is born. . .BUT. . .the teacher is supposed to die in child birth. . .BUT. . .the anti-Christ sacrifices itself for its mother?? Maybe? I don't know. You tell me. Oh, is there a connection between the kindergarten teacher and that slaughter of the hippy commune in 1970 California? Maybe? Does it matter? The End.
The acting is pretty bad. Herbert Lom of the Pink Panther films plays the old cult bum, and, unfortunately, he doesn't ham it up, but actually tries to play it straight, and gets more laughs in this film than he does in a Pink Panther film.
The only other actor worth mentioning is the girl who plays the kindergarten teacher: Kelly Curtis. Kelly *Jamie Lee's sister* Curtis. She's pretty bad. She delivers her lines like she's learning how to read. And she refused to do nude scenes, so. . .she's nowhere near the Scream Queen her sister is.
I know this sounds like a bad movie. But like I said, if you want to see a kindergarten teacher get raped by a stork, and a whole bunch of other random nastiness, this is a pleasant amusement. So what I am saying is, you know if this type of shit is for you, or not.
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