The Sect

The Sect credits three talented screenwriters. Trouble is, they were all writing different movies.

The story opens in the Southern California desert circa 1970. A group of hippies have established a small camp by a stream. Out of the brush strides a Manson-like figure named Damon, played with arresting intensity and menace by Tomas Arana. He asks for food and drink and the hippies oblige.

“Maybe you know my name, but what is confusing you… is the purpose of my game,” says Damon. One of the hippie women recognizes the lyric from a Rolling Stones song. “Their music is only for a few,” continues Damon, “If you are into their songs then you know there is something profound about it and awareness that goes beyond.”

Later that night, Damon massacres the hippies (including their toddler child) off-screen in ritual sacrifice.

Cut to 1991 Frankfurt, Germany. A young woman walks down the busy streets. A car stops and a middle-aged man gets out holding his infant child. He spies the young woman and his face grows cold. The young woman’s eyes widen and she looks away, hurrying her pace. Never taking his gaze from the young woman, the middle-aged man says he’s going for milk, gives the baby to his wife, and races after the young woman.

The young woman eludes capture and returns home, but discovers the middle-aged man waiting inside for her. “Why did you disobey, Mary?” the man shrieks, before stabbing her repeatedly in the chest.

Cut to the subway. A pair of pickpockets mingle amongst the packed car. They spy the murderer from earlier, oblivious to the bloodstains on his sleeve, their eyes fixed on the gold necklace dangling from his pocket. They lift it, but attached they find a human heart. This triggers a panic as the middle-aged man recovers the heart and flees.

It’s an intense opening that sets up a film that never materializes. Instead, we pivot to an aging man named Moebius Kelly, played by Herbert Lom, who journeys by bus to Seligenstadt with a mysterious package. He suffers from near-fatal coughing fits and treats himself with an unknown substance delivered via eyedrops.

Once in Seligenstadt, he exits the bus, walks into the street, checks the sun as some kind of positioning system, then almost gets run over by Miriam, a schoolteacher, played by Kelly Curtis.

Miriam takes Moebius back to her home to convalesce. He seems to recognize the place and her. Soon, Moebius enacts his secret plan—to birth the Anti-Christ. A critical piece of said plan is the well in Miriam’s basement, which, besides leading to the local runoff basin, also serves as a gate to hell. We also get unexplained neon-blue twist-tie looking things floating in Miriam’s water, a rape scene involving a giant bird, nose beetles, a satanic shroud, face transplants, and evil rabbits.

How did we get from a 1970s Rolling Stones-loving Manson figure to this? According to Alan Jones in Profondo Argento, the film began as Catacombs, a script by screenwriter Gianni Romoli for financiers Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori. Producer Dario Argento wrote the opening sequence, while director Michele Soavi transplanted sequences from his unproduced script, The Well. This explains the film’s disjointed nature.

Soavi makes the best of it. Consider the opening. Soavi coaxes a riveting performance out of Arana and establishes a nihilistic atmosphere that would make Lucio Fulci proud. Granted, Argento wrote it, but it’s Soavi’s execution that shines despite Argento’s insistence on the awkward Rolling Stones connection. Jones quotes Romoli saying, “Argento is still very attached to that period. Both Michele and I let him get on with it.”

Unfortunately, the entire sequence is superfluous. I suspect Romoli crafted the subsequent sequence in Frankfurt to bridge Argento’s opening into his existing script. It too proves superfluous, and its impact’s further lessened by the exposition dump the script proffers via television newscast that tells us everything we’ve already inferred.

This writing “glue” extends to the script’s machinations to shoehorn in the basement well, bloating the running time to over two hours.

The result feels like three movies juggling for position. The first, a satanic shocker involving a devil-worshipping cult poised to reveal themselves to the world in a murderous rampage. The second, a more surreal Wicker Man-style folk horror comprising the bird imagery, the rabbit, and the well. And the third, a Rosemary’s Baby redux. That the film settles on the third proves the most underwhelming as it lacks the social subtext of Ira Levin’s veiled treatise on women’s reproductive rights. Better to have leaned into Argento’s exploitation or Soavi’s surrealism.

For their part, the cast does their best. Lom shines, convincing as the ailing Moebius. Soavi gives him lots of close-ups and his worn face and bloodshot eyes convey years of hard living. Arana’s performance as Damon packs enough intensity to sustain an entire film. A shame he was underutilized.

Kelly Curtis doesn’t fare as well. At first, I thought her miscast, intending to evoke her younger sister Jamie Lee Curtis, but, at thirty-five Kelly seemed a decade too old to play a teacher a year or two out of grad school, still living like a college student, with her house in disarray and her fridge a mess of rotting leftovers.

But later, the film seems to indicate she should be thirty-five and worried she was too old to bear children. Likely this was a casualty of the script grafting process, but the resulting dissonance renders her character off-putting. Seeing a near-middle-age woman live like this feels wrong, even if we can’t put our finger on why.

Still, despite the disjointed storytelling, The Sect is worth a watch for fans of the creators, who can enjoy a fun game of “spot the influence”. For example, the water scenes evoke Argento’s Inferno, while the bird motif echoes Soavi’s StageFright.

Soavi proves himself a capable filmmaker with a formal style distinct from Argento’s, which he uses to craft some haunting visuals, beginning with Damon’s backlit emergence from the desert brush, through to the Hellraiser-esque face-swapping sacrifice, and the nightmarish rape sequence.

These scenes also highlight the film’s excellent effects, including a squirm-inducing beetle-up-the-nose scene reminiscent of the ear bugs in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Pairing these strengths with a leaner, tighter script may have elevated the result to something more resonant. But that would come three years later, when Soavi and Romoli, minus Argento, delivered the superior Cemetery Man.