Nor is it The Iceman Cometh.
It's not quite F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Or Masque of the Red Death.
It's certainly not Tennessee Williams (well, maybe Milk Train).
I imagine it like a rightfully unpublished short story from a teenage Flannery O'Connor that some evangelicals found and made into a community theater morality play. Then they glommed onto the slasher craze of the early 80s in an attempt to save some souls. But they filmed it through a Giallo lens with a thorough dose of Corman.
It's rather heavy-handed on the drama. Light on the horror. There's a couple of twists. The second of which is a head scratcher. If the new pastor is the Grim Reaper as is implied from his sermon, wouldn't that mean that all of them returning to church is some form of purgatorial penance or infernal damnation? That's a bizarre mixed message for a film purporting to be a religious fear piece on redemption. But that gives the movie a depth and ambiguity that I don't think the filmmakers intended.
I side on the movie having an overtly pious narrative that was inept in its theme and resolution. Still, tje movie had an amateur atmosphere, weird aethetic and earnest gusto to its vignettes that made it somewhat watchable.
It's not quite F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Or Masque of the Red Death.
It's certainly not Tennessee Williams (well, maybe Milk Train).
I imagine it like a rightfully unpublished short story from a teenage Flannery O'Connor that some evangelicals found and made into a community theater morality play. Then they glommed onto the slasher craze of the early 80s in an attempt to save some souls. But they filmed it through a Giallo lens with a thorough dose of Corman.
It's rather heavy-handed on the drama. Light on the horror. There's a couple of twists. The second of which is a head scratcher. If the new pastor is the Grim Reaper as is implied from his sermon, wouldn't that mean that all of them returning to church is some form of purgatorial penance or infernal damnation? That's a bizarre mixed message for a film purporting to be a religious fear piece on redemption. But that gives the movie a depth and ambiguity that I don't think the filmmakers intended.
I side on the movie having an overtly pious narrative that was inept in its theme and resolution. Still, tje movie had an amateur atmosphere, weird aethetic and earnest gusto to its vignettes that made it somewhat watchable.