Desecration (1999)

Interesting, if incoherent, microbudget flick.
Desecration (Dante Tomaselli, 1999)

Desecration, Dante Tomaselli's first film, lacked anything approaching a rational budget for a movie, and, most of the time, also lacks a coherent storyline. That said, there is one thing that Desecration never is, and that's boring. That alone is reason enough to watch it.

The story has to do with Bobby (Danny Lopes), a boy at St. Anthony's catholic school. Bobby is sixteen (despite having been an infant-- maybe a toddler-- eleven years earlier, when his mother died after a severe asthma attack) and somewhat troubled. As the movie opens, Bobby is on school grounds flying a remote-controlled airplane as a group of novice nuns are admitted into the order. As they leave the chapel, solemnly celebrating, Bobby's remote control unit malfunctions, and the plane crashes into one of the novices, killing her instantly. After that, Bobby starts having odd dreams about his mother; his grandmother Matilda (Irma St. Paule) is convinced the Bobby's mother's soul is trying to possess Bobby. Things get weirder when Bobby's friend Sean (Mark Mamone) is swallowed up by a mysterious hole that appears on campus, then disappears; Bobby, with the help of a sympathetic teacher (Vincent Lamberti) who's willing to play along with what he believes is Bobby slowly going insane, has to find Sean and deal with the demons haunting him.

Yeah, it's pretty complex, and the movie's major failing is that Tomaselli, who also wrote the script, never manages to make anything coherent out of it. When done correctly, this can make a horror film really shine (John Carpenter was exceptional at this), but most of the time it ends up looking like a mangled mess. That's the case here, and the amateur acting doesn't help matters much, but what really saves this is that, for a basement-budget production, it's an absolutely gorgeous movie. Tomaselli, who had no budget for special effects, takes the Val Lewton approach: have as few as possible, and generate horror in the audience through little tricks that cost no money (such as a strangely disappearing hole in the earth). He's also not afraid to go for the outright weird, which makes some scenes that would otherwise be a confused muddle of timelines actually kind of work (Bobby falls asleep about two thirds of the way through the movie and goes into a multi-layered series of dreams, all of which are pushed into the background by the fact that weird plants are growing all around him in the room).

Judging by its rating on IMDB, a lot of people hated this movie. I am not one of them at all. I think Tomaselli has a great deal of potential, and he's certainly got a cameraman's eye for what works on celluloid; a very interesting debut. ***

Looks good but leaves you with no answers
Apparently "Desecration" is a low budget, independant film. Well, I will give it full credit for working on a low budget as it visually belies such humble origins. The film looks wonderful most of the time. Sadly, what it doesn't have is a decent story.

There really isn't much plot to describe. What I do know is that a boy called Bobby is currently attending a religeous school, and his life is blighted by two tragedies. First was the loss of his mother at an early age, and more recently his accidental killing of a nun by his out of control model aircraft which flies into her face, killing her outright (!). But from this early promising start, the film almost immediately gets lost in constant and unexplained "surreal" imagery. The young boy is haunted and hounded by apparitions of the dead nun, and the rest of the school is similarly troubled, as other nuns start to experience various paranormal manifestations, including one quite startling sequence (probably the one most people are going to remember) in which a nun is attacked by a floating pair of scissors. Bobby starts suffering from vivid and macabre nightmares in which he is chased by clowns or attacked by the ghoulish dead nun or surrounded by evil sprouting plants. Some of them involve his dead mother, but why does she appear to be the same person as the nun who was killed by the model aeroplane?

This all looks very impressive on screen, but after about 60 minutes of such whacky imagery, it started to dawn on me that the film didn't really have a lot else to offer other than this. And even though I was concentrating, the amount of screen time devoted to explaining what on earth was going on was about 45 seconds worth - it's during Bobby's grandmother's visit to a clairvoyant who blurts out the only clue in the whole movie - and a pretty daft one it is too. So prepare yourself for a very pretty ride but with no resolution or explanation of the sights along the way. Although a lot of the visuals are really good - the scissor attack and some of Bobby's hallucinations like the changing painting of a nun that he watches on a wall - they have to be linked up by something a bit better than this. Don't get me wrong, I do like surreal cinema, and enjoy an enigmatic horror movie, like, say "Lisa and The Devil". But Dante Tomaselli is no Mario Bava, and he needs to go a long way before equalling that kind of level. And even "Lisa" has an ending... "Desceration" has none! The film just stops, with not a single plot line tied up - I could scarely believe my eyes when the end credits started rolling, as I felt like I deserved some kind of pay-off for devoting 90 minutes to watching the thing.

Sorry, but for me this is extremely unsatisfying. There are two ways this might have worked: it either needed to explain the plot properly, or else just give the whole film over to the hallucinatory experiences of the central character. I can cope with intentional illogicality, but I don't honestly think the film is supposed to be quite so confusing. I think it just fails to successfully serve the story that is supposed to go with the evocative imagery. And the lack of an ending is unforgiveable.

Dante's Terror
I thought this was a very interesting show when I saw back a few years.Saw it again a fews back and even enjoyed better than I remembered. Lot's of sub plots and things going on all the same time. I found this very satisfing and strongly suggest that you get a copy if you can. They are getting very hard to find.