Review of The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995) by Sarah H — 24 Oct 2007

Stumbling upon so-bad-they-are-good movies.

How irritating. I was just zapping pointlessly when I stumbled upon the opening credits of a movie I'd never heard about, THE PASSION OF DARKLY NOON.

I decided to give it a go for two reasons, one serious and one not. Serious one: it was by Philip Ridley, the author of that magnificent weird vampires-in-rural-Midwest tale THE REFLECTING SKIN, and of... not much else. So some weirdness was guaranteed. Not very serious reason: Brendan Fraser's in it, woot! As a sociopath! Pwhoar! I prepared to be entertained.

The movie is an awful, straight-to-video, preposterous and predictable shambles. Quite shite, really.

BUT.

It contains some of the most effective Christian/Catholic visuals I've ever seen in a movie, on a level to Verhoeven's THE FOURTH MAN, I'd say. (the theme is also the same: hyper-religious freak obsessed by lust and losing his mind slowly).

Someone there knew how to make Catholicism look really evil, and twisted, and bloody fucking sexy too (Brendan Fraser rolling meters of barbed wire around him as a cilice? MORE please!! Never mind that the blood which comes out is so pathetically fake it looks like running paint,and indeed it is).

(Hilariously, Wikipedia states this about cilices: Although use of the cilice is no longer common, its practice in the Catholic Church is "more widespread than many observers imagine. ...... On the other hand, critics state that self-mortification is a "startling," "extreme," and "questionable" practice â?? one that borders on masochism. NO REALLY? It BORDERS on masochism? Oh! I never thought one could do it for THAT!!! oohh!! It's a twisted world out there! I'm shocked!!!!!!!! ).

So I wouldn't know whether I should suggest you to watch this movie for the imagery, or just say it's a load of tosh. It's just irritating that the visual ideas are lost in such an unimportant, crap movie. Compare and contrast with DOMINION, which I recently saw, and which is a serious, basically gore-free movie about the Devil. It was directed by aesthete Paul Schrader, one who doesn't do big noisy drama but goes for the devils inside, not outside (he wrote Taxi Driver, and directed American Gigolo, Mishima, the truly disturbing but formally cold Autofocus). Maybe if they'd called Ridley instead.........