Hello, true believers, and welcome to You Aughta Know, a column dedicated to the decade that is now two full decades behind us. That’s right, it’s time to take a look back at one of the most overlooked decades of horror. Follow along as I do my best to chronologically explore the horror titles that made up the 2000s.
We were a brand new baby decade that just exploded into the new millennium. Y2K was an epic flop, Clinton was still president and if you were lucky enough to have an N64 you were probably popping corn nuts with mouths full of Mountain Dew while button jamming on some Bomberman. How would we end up defining ourselves? In the genre in particular, we were still riding the highs and lows of the post-Scream era, we were a couple years away from the J-horror remake craze and even further removed from the “torture-porn” era. (We gotta come up with a better name for that, right?) In this in-between, to kick off the New Year, we were gifted with Mike Mendez’s The Convent.
Now Mike Mendez hadn’t done too much before this nunsploitation possession flick. Having helmed Killers and Bimbo Movie Bash, before going on to make bombastic action horror films like Big Ass Spider! and Don’t Kill It, Mendez teamed up with screenwriter Chaton Anderson for this throwback full of gore, Buffy-esque demons and the kid who made one of the first viral videos with “Shoes.”
You read that right. “Shoes.”
Like many great horror movies, the film starts in 1960 where we see a young woman swagger her way straight into a Catholic school’s chapel, just bleeding James Dean cool, fully intact with leather jacket and shotgun. I mean, she’s such an incredible ass kicker that she swigs on whiskey WHILE smoking a cigarette. Is that even possible?! Who cares because this movie hits the ground running and never steps off the pedal.
Fast forward to the then present (and now past) and we meet Clorissa, former goth girl turned sorority sister, who is headed out to the now abandoned and supposedly haunted school to beat out some other sorority and graffiti their letters in there first. Travelling out with a group of standard horror tropes, Clorissa encounters a group of demonic nuns who are hellbent on summoning the antichrist into the body of a virgin. Things go south fast and she must team up with the town local legend, the very same woman who wrecked shop on the nuns forty years prior.
Anderson had a lot of fun with her script here, clearly making clear callbacks to the horror comedies of the 80’s but also venturing back into 50’s genre fare. Many characters are stock roster genre characters (we have our horny couple and our bad boy), and the film also takes some veers into silly fun with our strange brother character, morbidly obsessed goth girl and our over-the-top mentor heroine, played by horror vet Adrienne Barbeau. While not everything ages well (a Mexican character named Frijole and some pretty questionable sexual commentary), we’re not here to woke test something made twenty years ago.
No, we’re here to declare that Mike Mendez’s The Convent deserves a revisit because it’s a spitfire movie that exists to have a damn good time. Everything is loud and in your face, from character interaction to the slew of demon people of the cloth chowing down and slicing into any warm body they encounter. Sporadic windows of music video stylings are peppered throughout, lots of quick spurts of character movement, and Mendez finds echoes of Evil Dead with his perfect ratio of humor and action.
While the gore effects aren’t quite up to par with Raimi’s classic, the humor is even more outlandish and the action beckons callbacks to the creme de la creme of the subgenre. I mean, Barbeau belts our lead to her back like a baby bjorn and swings around like a fully loaded revolving door as they alternate shots between a pump action shotgun and a machine gun. Do you know how ridiculously fun it is to watch Stevie Wayne and a prepped out member of the Greek system mow down Whedonesque demons in holy garb for like five full minutes? I don’t know how to quantify “a butt ton” exactly but it is that much fun.
There’s nothing too deep here. It’s a true blue popcorn movie and all the better off for it. Bill Moseley shows up as an unhelpful cop but perhaps even better is Coolio popping in as an even more ill-suited officer of the law, a quickly agitated officer with an itchy trigger finger, and we get a truly awesome big bad with our reveal of the antichrist, a horned beasty that delivers on the goods thanks to special effects art by Howie Adams.
The Convent is now available on Amazon Prime and it’s well worth the watch. Mendez pulls the best parts of different generations and delivers a frenzied motorcycle ride into the new millennium. And what a fun way to kick off the decade it was.
