Order [Special Edition]

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Because my father's family is Catholic, I recall when I was very young going to the local Catholic church, a very old building, for weddings and funerals and finding it kind of spooky. All the solemn pageantry of the ceremonies and those dark shadows and stained glass windows and doleful statues, and the Latin the priests used to use. It's no wonder filmmakers have regularly taken advantage of the Church's somber traditions for any number of their horror movies.

On the other hand, it's also unfair to keep pounding on one church the way they do. I understand the Catholic Church was displeased with 2003's "The Order," and it seems to me for good reason. Maybe they could have sued the studio for defamation of religion. Or maybe filmgoers should have sued the studio for making them watch this murky mess. Defamation of personal time or something.

Anyway, it probably doesn't bother fans of these films one bit that critics hate them or the general public shuns them. I mean, even the best of the breed, like "The Exorcist" or "The Omen," are pretty silly affairs, and not even such formidable filmmakers as Roman Polanski and Johnny Depp ("The Ninth Gate") or Arnold Schwarzenegger ("End of Days") could make much of the genre. Then there were William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert, Tom Skerritt, Ida Lupino, and Keenan Wynn in "The Devil's Rain," but that film may have bombed more on account of William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, etc., than through any fault of its own. In any case, the worse they are, the better their fans seem to like them. There's something comforting, I suppose, in watching really awful horror movies, especially ones filled with darkened chapels (cathedrals are even better), religious superstitions, Satanic rituals, and plenty of blood.

But enough of this. What's "The Order" all about, you ask. Well, it's about 102 minutes, actually, which is a lot easier to explain than the absurdities of the plot. The movie stars Australian Heath Ledger, whose name is at least as good as any of the pictures he's worked in. He plays a priest living in New York City, Father Alex Bernier, who along with a friend, Father Thomas Garrett (Mark Addy), has been trained by an older cleric, Father Dominic (Francesco Carnelutti), to "dispatch ghosts, demons, and all manner of undead." He's a ghostbuster.

As the movie opens, Father Dominic dies in Rome under suspicious circumstances, and with the encouragement of a Cardinal, no less, Michael Driscoll (Peter Weller), Alex heads to Italy to team up with Thomas and investigate. Naturally, you can't have a handsome young priest without having a beautiful young woman as well, so Mara Williams (Shannyn Sossamon) goes along for the ride. She was once institutionalized for trying to murder Alex during an exorcism and recently escaped from her hospital and is being sought by the police. Obviously, she has no trouble getting a passport and flies off with Alex. You think I'm leaving stuff out? Sorry. If none of this explication makes sense, none of it is accounted for in the movie, either.

Once in Italy, where the film was shot, we meet the final major player in the melodrama, William Eden (Benno Furmann), a really, really old young man of mysterious origins. It is from Eden that Alex learns about the "Sin Eater," the "Other," a man who sits at the bedside of dying folk and takes upon himself the dying persons' transgressions. The Sin Eater provides "a path to Heaven for the dying outside the Church and the Saviour." You can see how a Sin Eater would be in great demand and command a very large reward for his services. In consequence, the Sin Eater is fabulously wealthy and lives forever. Why he's immortal and whom he ultimately serves are good questions, but nothing is ever clarified in this film; it just is. And if you haven't guessed it by now, the Sin Eater is anxious to give up his position after 400 years and hand it over to somebody else.

If none of this sounds especially thrilling or scary, you're right. The script and actors merely plod their way forward from one senseless situation to another, with the end fairly certain in sight. On the way we get the typical religious horror-movie clichés: Off-kilter camera angles; slow motion shots; sinister children; sound-overs of liturgical music, chants, and whispers; an occult bookstore; arcane manuscripts; even a gothic night spot called the Club Inferno, complete with dungeon and Satanic cult worshippers. You've seen it all before.

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