The Convent (2000)

Sadly Over-hyped

One of the best films i have seen

Absolutely brilliant

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

The horror genre is undoubtedly more diverse than any of cinema's other genres, and while that does mean that there's a lot of different and original horrors; it also means that any good idea liable to be done more than once. This has become a big problem for the modern genre with the recent wave of remakes. The Convent isn't a remake by name; but it could easily be a remake of the eighties classic Night of the Demons as the basic plots are more or less identical - but at least enough of it has been changed to ensure that it gets away with being a different film. This is how remakes should be done! Anyway, anyone that has seen the aforementioned eighties horror will recognise this story instantly. The film begins with a cool sequence that sees a young girl brutally execute a bunch of nuns with a shotgun. Fast forward fifteen years and a bunch of school kids are planning to break into the convent where it all happened to see if it really is haunted by the dead nuns...It has to be said that this film isn't a piece of high quality film-making. The acting is largely ridiculous and the special effects are so bad that they make the majority of the cast look on par with some of the greatest performances of all time. However, the film was clearly never meant to be seen as great horror; and thankfully it does work as a fun, trashy horror comedy. There's always plenty going on and the film never really has time to get boring, which is certainly to its credit. The majority of the characters are rather dull, and this is not helped by the fact that the most interesting one is killed off towards the beginning; but the loss of her presence is somewhat made up for the appearance of a couple of bumbling 'Satanists' that provides the laughs. The film also features a few cameo appearances; we've got rapper Coolio and Bill Moseley as a couple of coppers; and even better Adrienne Barbeau as motorcycle riding demon killer. Overall, I really wouldn't recommend anyone goes out of their way to see this film; but it's fun enough for what it is and people that enjoy this sort of film surely wont be too disappointed.

This movie is one of the worst horror movies I have ever seen. From the very first scene, i knew it would be a smash crash. It starts with a seemingly bad girl killing a bunch of nuns in a mission. As it turns out, the people in it were possessed by some random zombies. Well, some years later, some college kids are pulling some pledge prank. Horrible acting goes from pledge to the head jock. Things like the jock yelling at him to do stuff in quite a non-chalonte manner, with pledge over reacting and over-doing the whole "eager to be popular role" What really took the cake with this one is the final battle. Absolutely HORRIBLE special effects with the guns. For example, guns making a noise with no muzzle flash, and vice-versa. this is accompanied by stop-animation zombies (why they move in stop motion is a mystery), cheesy music, and about 40 guns that come out of nowhere.Overall, this movie is crap. Just like so many others you can rent for 50 cents at your nearest low brow movie rental place.

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 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.