2 nun 2 sploitation
HELLO
unusually for a blog dedicated almost entirely to what vera farmiga was doing fifteen years ago, today’s post will contain mild SPOILERS both for the movie immaculate (2024) and the first omen (2024), so if it feels in any way not obvious to you what probably happens in either the movie immaculate or the first omen, please give this one a miss!
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the other day, we went to see immaculate (2024), a nunsploitation movie about looking fire and serving cunt at the covent, because it was easter sunday and it's important to do one's duty on holy days. a couple of weeks after that, we went to see the first omen (2024), a nunsploitation movie about what if you went to rome and bill nighy was there, and my experience of the latter so affected my opinion of the former that i immediately felt compelled to tell you about it. in between seeing these two movies, i also saw late night with the devil (2024), a movie i do not propose to talk about as it demonstrably involves neither nuns nor nunsploitation, though i will say that for a film i do not actually think was very good, i enjoyed it enormously and i hope david dastmalchian gets his flowers, but also you could really just as easily go and see ghostwatch (1992) if you're into that kind of thing.
i should say from the outset that whatever my changing opinions on the movie immaculate, it is not a film i wish to imbue with any deep or significant meaning, mostly because doing so would immediately cause it to collapse in on itself like a coffee table you found in the street and brought home despite one of its legs being attached with chewing gum. from the little i have read, it appears that its release has kicked off all kinds of conflicting debates on various topics, most acutely that of sydney sweeney's boobs, and whether or not they are reactionary, and this is a subject on which i do not intend to linger for a single solitary second because jesus fucking christ do people not have jobs. quite crucially, i thought that the movie immaculate was fun, and also kind of terrible, and also i didn't really like it that much, but beyond that i'm frankly bewildered as to how anyone could have a strong opinion about it, because what on earth is there to form an opinion about. loving or hating immaculate feels to me very much like the idea of loving or hating kate and leopold (2001), or the rescuers down under (1990) - like fine, you love it. really? ok no, i understand people love what they love. oh, you hate it? ok. well, you do you of course, but i can't imagine having a strong enough reaction to muster up a hard line either way.
all that having been said of course, let's talk.
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i have to admit that in the first instance, i really wasn't expecting the movie the first omen to be anything other than portentous garbage intercut with screensaver shots of vatican city and someone honking the word TRAUMA very loud, and the fact that i felt that is, i suppose, indicative of the specific horror moment in which we find ourselves. having moved some distance from the great flourishing of elevated auteur horror that kicked our collective teeth in around the mid-to-late 2010s, we are now firmly back in the trickledown period, with ever more derivative sequels, quick-fixes and IP projects all co-opting the language of their more successful forebears, so that the pitch for every movie currently seems to boil down to susie is haunted by an enormous monster made of breasts but actually the breasts symbolise the trauma inherited from her dead mother who was old and that's disgusting (if we can't get dakota johnson or kevin bacon's daughter can we try the cindy crawford nepo baby idk)((also it is possible this is actually a legacy sequel to the texas chainaw massacre in which someone gives sally a gun idk did anyone check rights on that)). we are, i think, smack-bang at the point of the endlessly rotating horror cycle where trash reasserts itself - a push that has been driven, this time, by fashion, and also by the streaming churn, and also by the fact that we live in atrocious times and people need to make and watch horror movies to deal with it. the auteurs are busy making movies about tennis (luca) or producing sexy vehicles for dev patel (jordan peele) or directing tedious garbage (ari aster) and so the wheel rolls back around to less high-minded content directed by less illustrious artists. and that's broadly a good thing, honestly. i like that. you think i run a blog dedicated to three stars fine horror movies because i want it to be all florence pugh pulling that face all the time?
that having been said, i think there is a specific flattening that comes attendant on any cultural glut, whereby any mid-budget film eventually comes to look very much like another and all the themes and fears and contexts come to sound very much the same. i loved smile, and i liked talk to me, but you can't convince me they weren't functionally drawing from the same tropes and ideas as baghead (lol) or imaginary (lol) or even the pope's exorcist (not lol, there is nothing funny about this at all). couple all this with the fact that the first omen is a legacy prequel - which, twinned with a legacy sequel is my absolute most unfavourite of sub-genres - and i really was not expecting very much.
extremely weird, then, to have to come here and tell you that the first omen is a bewilderingly stylish and witty film, frequently extremely disturbing and made with its own fluent visual language which repeatedly presented me with images i'll be thinking about for weeks. telling the story of an american girl who comes to rome in the 70s to take the veil and immediately comes to the conclusion that all the nuns are fucking whackadoo and also has anyone gone through that door marked satan room: do not enter lately, it is a far far better movie than it has any right to be for what is after all a prequel to the 1976 horror caper that was saved from B-movie purgatory by gregory peck deciding he wanted to do it for some reason and replacing charles bronson as the american ambassador to the court of st james. everything about it seems to come from a director with a coherent and arresting central vision, from the crosses turning upside down during an important suicide scene to the impeccable sound design, to the bit where charles dance turns around and you realise a pole's gone through the back of his head. at one point someone gets hit by a truck and someone else, in an effort to help him, accidentally lifts his whole torso away from his legs, and it's great, and i loved it.
anyway, what i'm saying is that the first omen slaps, and has no business slapping - it slaps up to and including the moment it descends into fulltilt possession (1981) tribute act and the moment it thinks it's sneaking a suspiria (1977) reference past everyone, but you can't get one up on me. it slaps right up until it is contractually obliged to stop slapping, because it has to be a prequel to the movie the omen, at which point everything falls apart and ralph ineson is required to tromp on like captain exposition breathing into a very large trumpet saying things like the child will have the mark and the devil must mate with his offspring, and someone shows us a passport photo of gregory peck like here’s this guy, and it's very stupid. the end revelation, in which ralph ineson once again tromps on to be like they've given the devil child a name...it's....damien...and cymbals crash and foghorns blare, is one of the most excessively dumb mic drops i've ever known a movie to employ, because we the audience already know what the devil child is called, and the person ralph ineson is speaking to has not seen the movie the omen and so does not know why it is relevant or interesting that the devil child has been given a name, so her reaction is very much just like oh, well, damien is certainly a name isn't it, and then the movie ends, and it's a shame.
the thing is that for all the final fifteen minutes of this movie are a complete disaster, the rest of it is good enough that my first reaction on emerging from the cinema was to immediately dock the movie immaculate a full star in my head and seriously reassess the kind of slop we're all willing to tolerate these days. it's confusing, because one hulking great thing immaculate does have in its favour is that it is NOT AN IP PROJECT, and given that prior to the first omen we were subjected to five horror trailers, four of which were legacy sequels or prequels and one of which was about a big spider, this is genuinely not nothing.
side note: the tagline for the movie the strangers: chapter 1 is apparently "find out how the strangers became the strangers" and that is the fucking dumbest thing i've ever heard in my life.
anyway.
the problem with immaculate - discourse aside - is frankly just that it wanted to be the first omen but it didn't actually want to have to script, film or art direct the first omen. it is, in many ways, almost identical to the first omen - they are both movies about american girls coming to bad bad italian convents and immediately getting impregnated with satanic babies because of reasons - except that everything is a little bit off. the pacing is off, the art direction is weird, the final denoument (not including the tbf excellent last scene) is all over the place. without the unifying artistic vision of the first omen, what you get instead is in many ways what i assume would happen if riverdale did an episode where archie woke up in a convent and someone was trying to impregnate him - something i'm actually entirely sure they probably already did idk i've never seen it. the movie is not bad - it has all its good little points about female bodily autonomy and exploitation and the way that secrecy is often inherent in organised religion, all of which are extremely valid - it's just that if i learned anything from the first omen, it's that it's possible to do all that and also make an actual movie.
i am a person who full-throatedly loves total garbage, so it's hard to clarify exactly why this is the side i've come down on, except to say that i did and that i'm not here to justify myself to you. i can like it chapter 2 more than any human being should and still think immaculate should have tried harder and that is my prerogative. i contain multitudes. i don't know.
all that having been said, i should point out that at some point in the lead up to watching the first omen, i somehow got it into my head that alfred molina was in it and therefore spent the entire movie being like it'll be fun when alfred molina shows up, so i guess that's a point in immaculate's favour.