Remember when Xavier Gens came out with Frontier(s) and it was bloody and gross and kind of unique in its bloody and grossness and I remember kind of loving it but it’s been a long time so I can’t just stand by that but at one time I did so there’s that. And then he came out with The Divide which was good but my god what did Patricia Arquette do to deserve that and it fully bolstered my theory that Michael Biehn has to ADR his lines but by gum that was bleak. And then he did that segment for got ABCs of Death where – well – with that carving knife (I think or was it s hedge clipper) and it was disgusting and kind of made me sick? Do you remember all of that? Huh huh do you do you? Maybe you do but probably not but I haven’t heard of the son of a bitch in a long time and here he is directing this haunted nun movie that I could probably only describe as “mildly entertaining” with “one disturbing part*” and “a whole lot of bullshit talking by people you won’t care about” and “lame as fuck”. So where did you go, Gens? Did you mellow out as you got older? Did you fall asleep and have a dream about a tepid haunted nun movie and then went ahead and made one with all of your French euros? Huh huh did you huh?

*i know these are supposed to indicate footnotes but you can go ahead and just search this movie and see what I’m talking about. I didn’t really expect that to be at the top of the page when i was looking for a poster for this movie.

So here’s something less unpleasant:

This thing starts off in (I think) Romania where a woman is being carried screaming down a hall. Leading the way is a bearded man we know is a priest and my brains were having trouble discerning if he was a young Franco Nero or the guy who played Pimento on Brooklyn 99. Whoever he was he does yelling and splashing of holy water on the woman and we have seen movies and know he is doing an exorcism. My very first thoughts on this had to do with how over produced this movie is and wondered if it was supposed to be some sort of action type thing or maybe something French and a little later I learned this was made by Gens which kind of lead me into what would become my first paragraph of this beautiful post we are celebrating today. So with that the movie slips into what I think is England (or maybe the US with non US actors) and we see that the lady died during her ordeal overseas. “Why do you want to investigate a dead nun story??” Her uncle asks like the super newspaper owning editor guy he is. “Because of mom!!” She asserts in defiance. “You are just like my sister” he smiles and lets her fly to Romania on the company credit card, I guess.

In this small town in Romania, everyone speaks some sort of English so that’s good and she starts investigating why that bearded Franco Neto priest is in jail for murdering that screaming woman. “I didn’t murder her, the demon did” says the priest. “You have to have faith in faith” says another bearded priest, young and into motorcycles. “Your lack of faith defies your faith” says another older priest. “Your mother had faith but you not having faith in her, faith is your problem not hers” says someone else and I’m really not making all of this up – it might not by word for word but it goes on and on like that over and over.

Eventually she tracks down one of the other nuns from that place who almost violently refuses to talk to her but then suddenly does and they walk around a pond for what seems like a long time, her telling the story of the dead nun to a complete stranger she refused to talk to minutes before. “She went to Germany (I think) and had It with boy and came back changed” she recounts. This goes on and on for quite some time up to and including the part I’m not going to show out here, interspersed with the young lady rendered in the picture above telling her newspaper uncle all about it in this rural town where they must have great cell service. I want to firmly state that I love small towns and believe in them so I’m not dogging the town but hey, I mean some of the folks still carry lit torches down the street which could just be for effect but I was thinking it was for lighting. Maybe not though! Atmosphere!

Blah blah blah the girl gets a fly in her wine. The girl runs into a Gypsy boy. The girl sees mysterious screaming sound effect jump scares on her glitchy laptop screen. The girl dreams of balling the younger priest guy. The girl tracks down more people who refuse to talk but do anyway. Spoiler: The girl gets possessed by the demon that’s been floating around possessing everyone. She finds faith at the last second and the good guys win. Whoop!

I think all in all this was a very lame, unadventurous, unfun, boring movie with no substance for anything and nothing worth talking about unless we wanted to talk about how I’m glad I didn’t have to rent it. I would be surprised if anyone thought this was a good one but I am also surprised that there are people out there who think green bell peppers are spicy. So who knows?? Maybe water dripping from ceilings is what the kids want these days. Is that what gets people tearing the hole in the bag of popcorn now? Woah! What? Where did that come from?

FILED UNDER: A HOLE IN THE BAG OF POPCORN, ROMANIANS AND SURPRISE FLIES AND FRANCO NERO ALWAYS FOR THE WIN

And without further ado and probably just more doo doo – here is the updated Nun-a-thon graphic everyone’s just been dying to see: