{Blu-ray Review} All Amityville and Shit: The Convent (2000) on an Altogether Too Fancy 4K Release

“Away wit’ you damn creatures of the night!”

Regular readers are probably already aware of Analog Sunday but, for those who aren’t, it’s a monthly event here in Kansas City hosted by Elijah LaFollett, a designer and connoisseur of analog media who runs Magnetic Magic Rentals and curates some of the weirdest and wildest shit ever committed to magnetic tape for our collective delectation at the Rewind dive bar behind and beneath Screenland Armour.

As of this writing, Analog Sunday is gearing up for its annual Double-Creature event, which happens every October and moves the festivities upstairs to one of the actual theaters. Believe me when I say that it’s one of the must-attend events of the season.

Those who know me will understand what it means when I say that what Eli brings to Analog Sunday is almost always stuff I have never even heard of, often stuff that has never seen the light of day except on VHS. Which doesn’t mean that boutique Blu-ray companies don’t frequently unearth these same treasures, rolling them out to fancy and features-packed releases not long after I was introduced to them at Analog.

Such is the case with The Convent, which I first saw at Analog Sunday in April of 2019. Between then and now, it remained an under-discussed movie, which is wild because the pedigree of this thing is something else. It’s an early film from Mike Mendez, who would go on to direct The Gravedancers, Big Ass Spider, Don’t Kill It, and segments of both Tales of Halloween and Satanic Hispanics. Its cast features a slumming Adrienne Barbeau as well as Bill Moseley and Coolio playing cops for all of one scene (one-and-a-half, in Coolio’s case).

Finally, Synapse has put out The Convent on both Blu-ray and a probably unnecessarily fancy 4K, so it can be seen by those who have a spare $30 (or closer to $50 for the HD upgrade). Is it worth that? Probably not to the average moviegoer. But for connoisseurs of the kind of weird trash that is the specialty of the house at Analog Sunday, I can vouch that this is some top shelf weird trash.

Inextricably a product of its time, The Convent also feels like a movie from ten years earlier and, somehow, a movie from ten years later. The opening sequence, in which a sunglass-sporting young woman in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit assaults, shoots up, and sets fire to a convent which looks weirdly like the Alamo from outside, is clearly riffing on Tarantino and set to “You Don’t Own Me” performed by Lesley Gore.

It’s a strong opening and helps to establish what you can expect from the rest of the movie which is… lots of jokey ridiculousness in a plot that is basically a lift from Night of the Demons. Forty years after the events of that opening scene, a group of college students break into the eponymous convent, which has been abandoned since that violent day. They tell one another stories about what went down and why, including a tale about a secret abortion, and then, eventually, one of them – the goth girl played by Megahn Perry, doing her delightful best Fairuza Balk impersonation – gets possessed by demons, kicking off all the chaos.

The demon possessions are both great and terrible. Any sequence with them is edited to pieces and almost painfully frenetic, but their special effects are all brought to life with obvious blacklights. It’s silly, but it works, and it looks kind of great even while it looks incredibly cheesy, which is the perfect blend for this movie to strike.

Nothing in The Convent is ever meant to be taken seriously. There are stoners and horny virgins, slapstick Satanists and homophobic humor. There’s a chain-smoking, hard-drinking Adrienne Barbeau as the adult version of the girl from the intro, who is brought into play in front of a rebel flag, sports an arsenal of heavy weapons, and prays to God to start her motorcycle.

This is a movie made after Scream, which means that there are self-referential bits of humor, and characters sarcastically crack wise in almost every instance, even when they’re being messily devoured by demons, spouting the kind of dialogue that you can only find in this kind of direct-to-video dreck.

The closest any of that really comes to actually working is in the ways that the film constantly rewrites its own narrative. There’s what we see in the intro, then what the kids tell one another in the convent. When Adrienne Barbeau is confronted with all of that, however, she dismisses it. “That’s just the urban legend,” she says, before telling what really happened.

Not that any of it really matters very much. The demons aren’t even given a motive until the last reel. But then, since when did demons really need a motive, or a reason to kill everyone and turn them into more demons? It’s just a series of contrivances to trap (and re-trap) the kids in the convent and pick them off.

When director Mike Mendez was confronted about the depiction of the film’s gay character he reportedly replied that his interlocutor was “looking too deeply into it. There is no message.” Which can probably be applied to the film overall.

Fundamentally, The Convent is a delightful mess. The action sequences are noisy and jarring. The slapstick often works, the spoken humor… less so. But the movie itself is cracking fun that would play great as a double-feature with Night of the Demons, just about any Evil Dead knock-off, or Cthulhu Mansion. And if you like this kind of stuff, the Synapse releases are fancier than they probably deserve to be. What more could you ask for?