Desecration

U.S.A. / 1999 Directed by Dante Tomaselli Starring Irma St. Paule Christie Sanford Danny Lopes Color / 88 Minutes / Not Rated Format: DVD (R0 - NTSC) Image Entertainment

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In this vacuous era (now thankfully on the wane) of the I Still Know What Urban Legends Made You Scream Last Summer horror flick, thank God for independent filmmakers like Dante Tomaselli. His 1999 low budget feature Desecration, available on DVD from Image, is a refreshingly serious and genuinely creepy excursion into the supernatural, totally bereft of the supposedly hip, tongue-in-cheek irony that has so damaged the genre over the past few years.     Shot in New Jersey for $150,000 — which probably wouldn't even cover the tab for bottled water on the Pearl Harbor set — Desecration chronicles in surreal, time-warping fashion the strange events that take place at a private Catholic boys' school following the death of one of the teachers, Sister Madeline (Christie Sanford). In what is surely a one-of-a-kind scenario, the nun is killed when struck by a runaway remote-controlled model airplane. But was it truly an accident? The student flying the craft, 16-year old Bobby Rullo (Danny Lopes), certainly didn't mean to do it; his radio controller simply stopped working just moments before.     The sudden death of Sister Madeline immediately triggers a succession of ghastly phenomena. Soon Bobby (and others) begins to see visions of the dead nun in and around the school grounds. Another nun, Sister Rosemary, is horribly killed by a pair of animate, levitating scissors while cleaning out Madeline's room. Since the door was locked from the inside, shocked faculty members can only conclude she somehow killed herself in a kind of "spasm".     Bobby's bizarre visions intensify. He sees a fellow student fall through a mysterious hole in the earth, a hole that's not there when he brings the school's Brother Nicolas (Vincent Lamberti) out to the scene. At the same time Bobby's elderly, tubercular grandmother Matilda (Irma St. Paule) — who's concerned and well-meaning but still kind of creepy — begins experiencing her own strange visions back at the Rullo home. A superstitious woman from the Old Country, Matilda knows just what malignant force is behind these unnatural events: the evil spirit of her own daughter Mary (also played by Sanford), who died when Bobby was a small child.     Steeped in Catholic iconography, Desecration takes a meager narrative and imbues it with an ominous mood and atmosphere. The quality of the acting, production values, music score and (especially) direction is substantially higher than one would expect on such a tiny budget. A surreal, imaginatively helmed "dream" (Hallucination? Visitation?) sequence is clearly the movie's high point, though it offers a number of memorable scenes throughout. The scissors attack may well provoke a goosebump or two; I really dug the cool, unexpected crane shot that essays the possessed spirit of Sister Madeline floating about outside the school. And we've never seen seemingly innocuous party balloons used to such chilling effect! Director Tomaselli, in his first full-length feature film, demonstrates a command of the visual that harkens to the works of Dario Argento — without being a rip-off.     If there were actually any brains inhabiting those Hollywood suits, they'd do well to cough up a few million bucks and just let Tomaselli run with the ball.     NOTE: As of this writing, the New Jersey-based director is currently working on his second film, another low budget independent with the minimalist title Horror. Professional mentalist and TV personality The Amazing Kreskin headlines the cast.

Image's DVD release of Desecration is nearly a bare bones affair, with only an intriguing 4-minute film (the basis for the full-length feature) included as an extra. The disc menu is not animated. Picture and sound quality, thankfully, are exemplary.     An audio commentary featuring the director would have been most welcome. Still, kudos to Image for releasing the film on DVD. 6/27/01

UPDATE Image's Desecration DVD went OOP in 2005; it's now going for big bucks.

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