Desecration (1999)

December 11, 2002

by Nathan Shumate

Written, produced, and directed by Dante Tomaselli
Starring
- Irma St. Paule
- Christie Sanford
- Danny Lopes
- Salvatore Paul Piro
- Vincent Lamberti

From my perspective as a casual outside observer, it seems that Catholicism (including the long and involved cultural history, not just the official body of doctrine) has a seriously unsettling undercurrent. No, I’m not making any judgment as to the validity of Catholic faith (though, not being Catholic myself, I naturally think I’m right and you’re not), but speaking of most of the portrayals of it throughout creative media and pop culture. Yes, the priest is most often the one with the correct icons to vanquish a vampire or other supernatural beastie, but icons (in the audiovisual sense, not the theological sense) of Catholicism are often used to present an ambiguously creepy atmosphere: the cold vaulted cathedrals, the somber black of the clergy and oathbound devotees, the echoing tones of the chants… Against this backdrop, the basic Christian teachings of the Church are often presented through a filter of such severity and strictness that the heaven of media-presented Catholicism seems like a good idea only because we’re assured that hell is much, much worse. (It stands out for me, because Mormons don’t have either the scary sombreness of some currents of Catholics, or the mean-spirited apocalyptic glee of some Protestants. We do have grumpy Brigham Young, who apparently never smiled on portrait day, but it’s just not the same.)

Add to that the facts that a) Catholicism is so widespread a faith that it’s an instantly comprehensible symbol of faith when such needs to be hastily sketched in, and b) tons of horror movies from the ’60s and ’70s were made in traditionally Catholic Italy and Spain, and the upshot is that Catholicism is such an easy and effective backdrop to horror movies that you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a killer priest or possessed nun.

Ladies and gentlemen, Academy award-winner F. Murray Abraham!

Dante Tomaselli, young New Jersey Italian-Catholic that he is, took that imagery and ran with it here. I’ll say this for ol’ Dante (hey, with a first name that cool, you don’t expect me to call him “Mr. Tomaselli,” do you?), he’s got a definite flair for imagery, for composition, for pacing… for all those things we see as being uniquely a part of the cinematic language.

Our opening flashback has wizened Grandma Matilda (Irma St. Paule), who lives with her daughter and son-in-law, discovering said daughter dead in the upstairs playroom of an asthmatic attack, while her five-year-old son Bobby cries in the playpen nearby. It’s his birthday. (And no one ever explains why a five-year-old is in a playpen to begin with.)

Fast-forward, and Bobby is a student at St. Anthony’s Creep-Ass Catholic Academy, where the nuns are all getting their every-so-often blessing from the bishop. They then do this thing where one lights a candle, and the next lights her candle from the first’s flame, and so on — except the last nun’s candle ominously refuses to light. This Sister Madeline (Christie Sanford) is shaken by this (understandably — as human civilization is built on the ability to control fire, what would happen if it suddenly quit on us? Huh? Huh?), and leaves the chapel.

There always has to be one bad-ass priest, doesn’t there?

Apparently, the non-lighting candle is an omen which means “the holder of this candle will soon die a horribly, if unlikely, death,” because while Sister Madeline is outside, talking with the Mother Superior, Bobby’s also in the area, flying a contraband model plane. Suddenly his controls go out, and the plane decides to drive its propeller right into the sister’s head (prompting yet another punchline to “What’s black and white and red all over?”).

Naturally, someone calls Grandma Matilda, who’s been a surrogate mother to Bobby since his real one died. It’s while watching this scene, of the skeletal Matilda coughing big meaty phlegm into the phone while speaking to a distraught nun, that, well… Remember a few paragraphs back, when I praised Dante for his command of the cinematic language? You’ve been waiting for the other shoe to fall, haven’t you? Here it is: Dante Tomaselli, who also wrote the script, has an absolute tin ear for dialogue. Not to the extremes that make Ed Wood movies so gigglicious, but to the point that entire conversations sound like collections of non sequiturs. No help is the fact that many of the actors involved aren’t quite professionals. They’re passable, sure, but while passable actors can do well with a terrific script, and supernal actors can rescue a sorry script, the combination of unpracticed actors and a clunky script combine with a kind of anti-synergy to become less than the sum of the parts.

If thy left arm offend thee…

Anyway. Other weird things start happening. Matilda completes a puzzle to see Bobby’s face sticking up from a hole in the ground (and then the puzzle disappears entirely). One sister sees a faceless nun wandering the grounds, a blank grey mass where features should be. Another sister gets the shorter end of the stick; while she’s cleaning out Sister Madeline’s cell, she gets attacked by a pair of scissors and snipped to death. And not only that, but Bobby’s informed by the sepulchral Brother Nicolas (Vincent Lamberti) that he’s apparently flunking out of St. Anthony’s, despite having passing grades. How supernatural! Bobby responds by running off into the woods, where he has a fleeting glimpse of the dead nun, and then sees another student pulled into a hole in the ground that immediately disappears. Meanwhile, there’s some weird banging in the upstairs room where Mom died. It’s all very spooky…

…And it all resolutely refuses to gell into anything more than random shocks and images. The only one who seems to have any idea what’s going on is Matilda, and since she’s half-senile, she doesn’t manage to articulate it well. There’s something in here about Bobby’s mom trying to use him to come back from hell (dying of asthma is grounds for eternal damnation?), an idea semi-bolstered by the fact that Bobby’s mom (in flashback) and Sister Madeline are both played by the same actress. There’s also something about a Christmas present that Bobby’s mom had been trying to give him, the contents of which are kept from us as if there was a solution to a mystery there — then it peters out and disappears.

Suddenly public school doesn’t look half so bad, does it, Bobby?

By the last half hour, Desecration looks less like an honest feature film and more like an “I always wanted to do this” directorial indulgence reel. Bobby falls asleep and dreams of dead nuns and clowns while his room is overrun by plants that eventually carry him away (it’s Where the Wild Things Are!), so that he spends the night running from the dead nun (and rediscovering that mystery Christmas gift) while Matilda and Bobby’s harumphing dad (Salvatore Paul Miro) consult psychics and, yes, see the dead nun.

Far from bringing about any kind of resolution, the final scenes instead contradict whole chunks that have gone before, making you wonder what was supposed to be a dream, and why it matters. I’ve yet to figure out why the movie stopped where it did, or really, what anything meant. I suppose if I had gone to Catholic school, the admittedly striking visuals would have carried it for me, but I didn’t, so they couldn’t.

Clowns AND nuns? All we need now is big hairy spiders.

There’s nothing shameful about not being able to write screenplays well. Hitchcock wrote nary a one, and yet became the symbol of the auteur theory that the director is the “author” of a motion picture, more so that the screenwriter. Dante Tomaselli has a beautiful command of image; he needs to partner with someone with an equal command of word and story. It’s thus a little disheartening to see that his next feature, simply entitled Horror, also has him billed as sole writer-director. I reluctantly suspect it will be similarly full of sound and fury, both very evocative, but ultimately signifying nothing.