“Nuns, guns and gasoline.”
Mike Mendez released his first film in 1997. Killers was also just released on Blu-ray from Synapse films. The better of this Synapse double release is The Convent. For me this was the peak of Mendez’s low-budget horror films. Synapse must agree with that assessment, because they decided to give The Convent a UHD Blu-ray release in 4K, and that ended up being somewhat of a trick-or-treat combination, with The Convent absolutely being the treat here. Made in 2000, the film took a long time to make it to anyone’s screens. There was a distribution deal in place, and it fell through at the last minute. It’s the kind of luck Mendez has dealt with his entire career. His friend and co-writer on Killers lost his house when it was mortgaged to pay for that ‘ creation. He debuted the film at Sundance, and he had hoped for a wider release, at least on home video, but it took 2 years to finally happen.
Any chance at bigger screens were hurt by an original NC-17 rating which got back to R with the trimming of about 30 seconds from the film. Those 30 seconds have been returned here, so that kind of makes it all a double treat for horror fans.
The film “borrows” heavily from Kevin Tenney’s Night Of The Demons and its two sequels. The plot is pretty much the same. Instead of an abandoned funeral parlor, the lusty teens decide to party at an abandoned convent, with much the same results. We are treated to a bit of the convent’s evil history with a flashback very much like the one Menedez used on Killers. This time Christine, played in her youthful flashback by Mendez’s wife at the time, Oakley ,picks up a few guns, a baseball bat, and some matches, and takes out the convent and the nuns who lived there. She goes a little Harley Quinn on the place, and it ends up one of those small-town haunting legends. Meanwhile the elder Christine, played by genre favorite Adrienne Barbeau, is now a recluse in another broken-down place that also has a reputation for being haunted. No one approaches, because it’s rumored that she’ll give the same treatment to anyone who comes bothering her. The legend says she was raped by a priest and forced to have an abortion at the convent, so her pent-up rage might be somewhat justified. But like all local myths and legends, there is a grain of truth amidst a lot of howling at the moon here.
Meghan Perry stars as local “goth” chick Mo. She talks her friend Clorissa (Canton) into taking her to this party at the convent with a few of her friends. Perry pretty much fills the role that Amelia Kinkade did for the three Night Of The Demons films. She’s the first one to get killed and possessed thanks to a group of Satan-worshiper wannabes led by David Gunn, who offers a bit of comic relief here. He’s the poser “master” of the cult but really tries to get the other losers to do the hands-on stuff. He’s a stand-out minor character here, but he had a bigger role in Killers as Kyle, one of the James Brothers killers. So the place is indeed more possessed than haunted, but if you die here, you get taken over by the demons, and before long the big ugly folks start to outnumber the living potential fodder.
Like Night Of The ,the film pretty much rolls through the death and possession of the lusty teens, while Clorissa decides to brave the legends and goes to enlist the aid of Christine. After all, she’s the one who beat the big bad guys before. For fans the fun starts when Barbeau goes crazy on the demons, and the real fight between good and evil leads to a lot of carnage. Not that there isn’t plenty of that before Christine goes into action.
You have to give Mendez credit here, because he never takes himself too seriously. The film doesn’t try to be more than it is, and it rather celebrates its schlock elements. Credit is also deserved because there’s no CGI here. Sure, some of the bloody f/x are a bit corny, but he does manage one rather clever element here. With the subtle, or maybe not so subtle, use of changing the speed of the film and some odd quirky movements by the folks in demon guise, he creates a rather clever look and motion for these guys. Mendez doesn’t spend a lot of money on his films, and it certainly shows. But he does put every cent up on the screen, and so you end up with a film that doesn’t pretend to be anything else and makes no apologies for its shortcomings. All of that makes this quite worth the look.
Video
The Convent is presented in a somewhat altered aspect ratio of 1.78:1:1. The original film was shot and presented at 1.85:1. The ultra-high-definition 2160p image is arrived at by an HEVC codec with an average bitrate of 65 mbps. The movie was indeed shot on 35mm film so is native 4K. Look, this is an older movie shot with a very limited budget. Even with the native 4K source material, this thing is not going to look all that spectacular. But I will tell you the release makes everything that was there up there as nice as it’s ever going to look. The grain remains to give the film a nice organic texture along with the practical f/x. This film looks even older than it is, but that’s not really a bad thing. It’s atmospheric and faithful to the way it was shot, and that adds up to a really nice OK for me.
Audio
The DTS-HD 5.1 track isn’t going to show off your nice gear. It serves the 80’s-style synth music and the dialog. Plenty of creepy ear candy elements in the surrounds. The sub range is pretty weak, so you’re not going to get a lot of dynamic range here. The Iron Butterfly music playing over the young Christine’s rampage is actually pretty strong. But it doesn’t get any better after that.
Special Features
The extras are found on both the UHD and Blu-ray versions of the films. The menu and extras are identical.
Behind The Scenes Featurette: (8:33) Cast and crew offer up anecdotes about the filming experience. This is not one of those polished features. The footage and presentation are both raw, but that makes it a bit more fun for me.
Location Featurette: (18:33) This is a more recent feature. Mendez takes us to the locations for both films, and we can see what they look like today … at least the exteriors. We don’t get to go inside any of the locations.
Deleted Scene: (:31)
Gore Outtakes: (5:53) There are 17 short raw takes on many of the practical gore f/x with no individual selection option.
There is a photo gallery, a couple of trailers and an Audio Commentary to round out the extras here.
Final Thoughts:
These films were released in time for Halloween and were originally slated to be part of our 31 Nights Of Terror campaign. Upcomingdiscs is in Florida and we ended up getting hit by 2 hurricanes in a little over 2 weeks so we got behind in our posts in October. This would have made a great October film for you guys to have checked out. So have yourself a late Halloween part and let Synapse deliver the chills. Hurricanes. Who figured? “Made our town famous”.
