The Convent (2000)

You won't be disappointed!

Perfect cast and a good story

Absolutely brilliant

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

The opening scene of the movie, in the church, is wrong in this aspect: In 1960, all the nuns would have been kneeling at railings across the front of the church facing the altar for Communion. Their backs would be towards the pews, & the church entrance as well. The priest would have not been facing the people, either. The priest would have been standing, with his back to the congregation,at an altar against the front rear wall of the church. This is why most really old churches have this ornate altar across the front rear wall, while newer, modern churches just have an altar sitting out in the middle.The changes all occurred AFTER the 1965 Vatican II Conference and as far as I can remember, were effective in early 1966. So it was not until, say 1/1/1966, that people started receiving communion standing up in a line and the priest started saying the prayers for the Mass at an altar facing the congregation.AND the entire mass was in Latin in 1960....another of the Vatican II changes...The Mass and prayers were said in English after 1965.This is what years of Catholic school got me: trivial knowledge no one else remembers. LOL.... I cannot comment on the rest of the movie for historical accuracy because my teenage kids only forced be to watch the first few minutes (they wanted to see what I would say). They were floored when all I said was it is historically incorrect.

The Convent is an 80's film made in the year 2000. Normally I would be very pleased with this, but the comedic elements go too far in this one. If this film would have been played more seriously I would give it a shining review. It had all the great elements of a classic. It had a good storyline, good actors, great gore, a few genre veterans (Bill Moseley and Adrienne Barbeau), and it was highly reminiscent of Night of the Demons (a favorite of mine). The first 30 minutes are really engrossing and just drip with the 80's. But when the goth kids (one of whom works at the Dairy Cream) show up it's played directly for laughs. I was a bit puzzled as to the total change in tone and knew right away that I wouldn't be adding The Convent to my collection. But I was definitely entertained by this piece so I can't say I didn't have fun. The highlight for me was watching a demon getting a flashlight shoved in it's mouth and through the back of its head. That is a rather wicked scene. If I could compare Mike Mendez to a director it would be Brian Yuzna. Sometimes they need to reign in the goofy comedy and maybe go for some smarter laughs.

"The Convent" is a very UNoriginal but fun splatter-horror flick with the usual formula of dumb teenagers awakening an ancient type of evil they can't possibly deal with. The very cool and mood-setting opening sequence shows a young girl gunning down a bunch of nuns and a priest before setting fire to the convent/boarding school they're living in. The urban legend says that this girl – Christine – went insane after a forced abortion and that the convent is haunted by the restless souls of the nuns ever since. Now, 40 years later, a group of crazy college students breaks into the abandoned convent to play fraternity jokes, but soon they get possessed by demons in nuns' clothes and they're recruited to assist in performing virgin-sacrifices to Satan almighty. There's few tension or atmosphere but the script luckily enough inserts a lot of OTT-humor and ingenious ideas (a bunch of unbelievably clumsy devil-worshipers!) that makes this routine horror flick worth watching. The make-up effects are quite grotesque and nasty, with blood spurting out of every body hole and heads that are chopped off by the dozen. The dark and ramshackle convent makes an excellent horror location and the nun-costumes are really terrific. The true heroine of this film is Adrienne Barbeau ("The Fog", "Escape from N.Y") as the skilled demon-killer who comes to save the day. There equally are splendid cameo appearances for rapper Coolio and Bill Mosely ("House of 1.000 Corpses"). "The Convent" isn't exactly fundamental viewing, but it's good and unscrupulous horror-entertainment that fans will surely appreciate.

The best-case scenario to describe this pandering mess is to call it DEMONS meets PORKYS. You get 3000 bad jokes thrown at you like a bad Henny Youngman skit. The worst would have to be a conversation between two girls in Portable toilets and the director takes time going back and forth editing the conversation with identical shots of two toilet doors in sync with the conversation! The best line would have to be, Many of the special effects are corny, stupid and phony, the acting is dreadful (Coolio as a parrot top cop? Please, somebody help me as to why anyone thought this was a cool idea!) and most of the direction is sub par. For a movie that was supposed to be funny, I chuckled twice, which gives it a .002% success rate on the laugh-o-meter. And get this…the film is clocked in at 81 minutes, but 9 minutes and 47 seconds are for the end credits! That's roughly 71 minutes of actual movie running time. Funny, it seemed like 3 hours.