SAINT SINNER

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, two young and restless priests, snooping around in the basements of their monastery, discover a mysterious spherical sculpture depicting two nude women wrapped in a morbid embrace. On contact with the mysterious object, one of the priests' hands is sucked into the sculpture, providing vital energy for the awakening of the two Succubi of Evil depicted: the sisters Munkar and Nakir. As soon as they come back to life, through the Wheel of Time also hidden in the monastery's basements, the two Succubi travel to our days to feed and start the conquest of the world of men. It will be up to the surviving priest to chase them to avenge his brother's death and prove that he is the only holy and sinless man capable, according to ancient prophecies, of killing them. It's useless to beat around the bush and delay the inevitable conclusions: "Saint Sinner" is a bad, useless film, at times so rushed that it can even annoy the most willing of viewers. We can hardly explain why a writer of undoubted talent like Clive Barker, capable of giving metaphysical novels on the border between dream and nightmare to his loyal readers, as well as a good dose of pleasant cinematic films (among which we like to remember the mythical "Hellraiser" and the ambitious and visionary "Cabal"), could have signed such a cinematic scenario. The thought that his pen could have written such a banal and predictable subject, devoid of any pathos and a minimum of narrative coherence, is so depressing and annoying that it makes us hope for an erroneous and incompetent interpretation by those who read the original subject to make a screenplay (Doris Egan) and those who, subsequently, read the screenplay to make a film (Joshua Butler). Whatever the truth, Clive Barker's signature in this case unfortunately remains, and this eliminates any justification for such a clamorous misstep. Specifically, "Saint Sinner" drags on for an hour and a half without a single moment of interest, fragmented, poorly acted, incongruous (just think that despite an unnecessary temporal scan that signals the time with every sequence change, there are times when you have the impression of having lost some part of the film!). Furthermore, tension and eerie atmospheres are completely absent (the gothic darkness of "Hellraiser", for example, is light-years away...), to the point that it seems to be facing more of a ramshackle comedy than a real horror film. The two evil sisters arrive in our world wrapped in a kind of inexplicable gelatinous slime, which will accompany them throughout the duration of the film, simply to become two prostitutes with skin full of violet patches and a decidedly unpleasant appearance (supported also by two particularly ugly and indigestible actresses) with the intention of literally sucking alive, through a kind of giant straw (?) inserted into the neck, the daring clients they pick up. And the threat to the world is over? What happened to the apocalypse that the arrival of the Succubi would have generated? Absolute mystery... The protagonist also proves to be completely out of place: how can you cast a beautiful actor with an ultra-muscled physique sculpted in rock to play a young monk from the 800s? Hmm... We could go on endlessly, citing the pregnancy of one of the two sisters that gives birth to a kind of insect-octopus appearing in one of the last sequences of the film without playing any role within the story, or citing the crude and laughable way in which the moral dilemma of the monk who feels too little holy and very sinful is treated (just think that at the beginning of the film he looks at the breast of a young laundress biting an apple: what an audacious metaphor!), or again citing the many incongruities that follow one another throughout the film. But we prefer to stop here, also because if we revealed all the tragicomic situations of the film now, what fun would be left to rent it? One advice, however: watch it only if you really intend to spend an evening with friends and have a good laugh. Because if you rent it expecting a horror, you will shed many bitter tears.