The Convent is made with such obvious affection, I’m able to forgive that it literally plunges a knife into the heart of its least hateful character 30 minutes into its running time, and then makes us wait another 20 before Adrienne Barbeau shows up to kick some serious demon nun ass. It begins memorably in 1960, with a hot, young brunette in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform walking into a church and batting away at the assembled sisters (and father) with a Louisville slugger before setting them ablaze and blasting them with a shotgun, all to the sweet sound of Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me.”
Forty years later, the location of this massacre is the destination of choice for a trio of truly obnoxious fraternity assholes, their virgin pledge, two girlfriends and the super-cute, sarcastic Goth girl who’s just like the woman I imagined I’d end up marrying back when I was 14. (It didn’t happen.)
The trouble starts when super-cute Goth girl is sacrificed by a quartet of pathetic Satanists, which causes the demons that necessitated the previous massacre to rise up from wherever they went the last time this all went down. In the end, the only person who can stop the demons from raising the Antichrist is the hot, 50-something version of the hot schoolgirl who took care of the problem the first time.
Needless to say, Barbeau is truly awesome as the foul-mouthed, liquored-up, tight-jeans-wearing demon slayer and is — along with The Convent’s sly sense of humor — the main reason to ignore the its obvious deficits and give it a chance. Clearly inspired by Night of the Demons and Evil Dead 2, The Convent is better than the former and nowhere close to the latter, which is exactly how it should be in a fair and just world such as our own. —Allan Mott