The Convent (1995)
1/10
Indescribably Awful
25 December 2006
A seventeen year old could do this at home. Here's how:

Take the most low-rent, brain-dead Hollywood teenage Satan-worshipper slasher flick you can imagine. Now: edit out the teenagers, edit out the violence, edit out the gore, edit out anything remotely suspenseful or titillating, and replace it all with quotes from Goethe and Nietzsche. Now,take it all very seriously and say you have an art film.

I guess if you are eighty-five instead of seventeen, someone in Europe will give you a prize. Sort of a sympathy award for a crazy old uncle.

Everything about this movie except for a few shots of the Iberian countryside is appallingly bad. The script has to be the laziest and most inept I have ever encountered outside of a community college classroom. Who knows what Malkovich and Deneuve were thinking if they actually read it before agreeing to make this film (assuming there ever was actually a script that could be read). Who knows what they thought when they saw the rushes. In fact, my theory about the ending is that all the actors (except the fisherman, I guess) simply abandoned the project in exasperation, walked off the set, and never came back. It's that ludicrous and incoherent.

And the Shakespeare theory that is supposedly the inspiration and impetus behind this entire trainwreck...to call it lazy, sophomoric, and stupid is to give it more substance and development than the movie ever bothered to.

Funniest, most unintentionally hilarious moment? When Deneuve tells "Baltar" (I'm not making that name up) how magnetic and irresistible he is. Only a great actress could have done that without needing oxygen almost immediately.
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