John’s Horror Corner: The Sect (1991; aka La Setta, The Devil’s Daughter), an overly pithy Italian horror with a subtle charm for entomology enthusiasts.

MY CALL: Slow and plotty, perhaps quite overly thought out, and slow as a consequence. But this film has a lot of intriguing ideas for the patient, thoughtful, and entomophilic viewer. MORE MOVIES LIKE The Sect: For more solid Italian horror of the era, consider The Church (1989) or The Wax Mask (1997).

What did I just watch? I thought I was walking into a breasty, campy, gory Italian jaunt that would struggle to exceed 80 minutes. But this was unexpectedly 116 minutes long, quite pithy (even overly so), and only features nudity in ways that made scenes more visceral (and not at all salacious).

An older man (Herbert Lom; The Dead Zone) of questionable health and even more questionable purpose is helped by schoolteacher Miriam (Kelly Curtis). She brings him to her home, which is strangely familiar to the man, and helps the man to rest. In her sleep, the man awakens and purposefully places a rove beetle (Staphylinidae) on her face which crawls up her nose. Then the man dies with his handkerchief tightly affixed to his face… like, weirdly tightly affixed.

This seems quite plotty for something so marginally interesting. There’s a lot of dialogue that just idles on. Every now and then there’s a really intriguing detail… but then it seems to take way too many boringly pithy scenes in order to reach the next item of substance.

Apparently there is a vast sewer system, boiler room and a well deep beneath Miriam’s home. The old man, who we learn was a long-missing (since the 70s) scholar of Satanism, clearly intended to come to Miriam’s home, find this secret well, and infect it with… something. Blue worms? Whatever.

The mother of one of Miriam’s students is an academic studying arctic fossil insects (rove beetles) which we are told have religious significance (a symbol of fertility and evil). This fictitious account of rove beetles suggests they lay their eggs in your brain (like the urban myth of an earwig). So is that what the old guy was doing… planting a preggers beetle on her to infest her brain?

Miriam’s co-worker Kathryn (Mariangela Giordano; Burial Ground, Patrick Still Lives) is attacked by the bewitched handkerchief that was on the old man’s face when he died—perhaps the influence of gypsy’s possessed handkerchief in Drag Me to Hell (2009). Now perhaps possessed herself, Kathryn out of nowhere seduces a trucker, who then is caught stabbing her to death and is horrified to discover what he’s done. It’s senselessly insane, but told with a calm straight face. Then, naked and bloodied and pronounced dead by a surgeon, Kathryn leaps up alive and well and attacks Miriam in the operating room and then slits her own throat! Lunacy.

More weird stuff? Sure. The old man leaves a message on Miriam’s answering machine that he left his diary at her house. But this diary fell from his hands when the coroner removed his dead body from her house earlier! Later, the message on her machine is not there. A ghost message! Dun dun dunnnnnn!

A bunch of hippie types and their kids camping in southern California are murdered (all off-camera) by a Jesus-like wanderer and his Lucifer-praising biker friends in a 1970 flashback. The murders show the swing of the knife hand and blood in spilled milk, but not the stab there-between. So, generally unsatisfying. As is most of the horror of this movie. Although the “stork attacks” were weird delights in this clunky Italian horror. Clunky, but satisfying. There’s also a very strange sewer water birth scene.

So that Jesus-like guy from California in 1970, well here he is in Germany 21 years later to do more Devil-worshipping stuff. It turns out that Kathryn’s ER doctor is a part of his trans-continental Satanic cult, and so is the husband of the paleo-entomologist who studies rove beetles. This cult gathers in the woods and plays with Hellraiser (1987) hooks. It’s one of the few effects we see realized on screen. They cut and snare a ring of hooks around their victim’s face, forehead to neck, and then yank and peel off her face, placing it over the dead old man’s face to bring him back to life. So yeah, a lot is going on here… although it’s not adding up to anything sensible by my math.

I wasn’t particularly pleased or impressed with this movie. But it wasn’t bad at all, it was way better than I expected, and much more serious of a filmmaking endeavor than I thought I was going to see today. Director Michele Soavi (Cemetery Man, The Church, StageFright) and co-writer Dario Argento (Dracula 3D, Mother of Tears, Two Evil Eyes, The Church, Demons 1-2, Suspiria, The Wax Mask) did alright. But I’d favor his other work very strongly above The Sect.