ORDER, THE - DVD review

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.

"The Order" was written, produced, and directed by Brian Helgeland, who wrote and directed "Payback" (1999) and "A Knight's Tale" (2001) and cowrote Clint Eastwood's "Blood Work" and "Mystic River," so you'd think he'd know what he was doing. Maybe not.

Perhaps this piece of the film's dialogue best sums up the tenor of the story: "What just came through here, Alex?" asks Thomas of his friend. "Demon spawn," replies Alex. "Nothing I couldn't handle."

You don't know whether to laugh or shake your head in disbelief. "The Order" is dark, murky, preposterous, and predictable. People talk in vague riddles. And the sins themselves come out of people's bodies looking like special-effects jellyfish. Finally, the ending, which seems to go on forever, takes a wholly expected turn that's more silly than scary or exciting. All in all, "The Order" is strictly for the devoted, B-grade horror-movie buff.

Video:
The picture quality of the DVD transfer is not all that easy to explain. In the first place, the people at Fox inexplicably offer it in two screen sizes, wide and standard, on flip sides of the disc. They don't do this often, and why they felt the need to do it here, I don't know. The widescreen measures an anamorphic ratio of 1.74:1 and the standard screen, of course, measures a ratio of 1.33:1, filling up the dimensions of a normal TV. But here's the thing: The film was originally shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio and later matted for widescreen viewing. So you'd think the standard-screen edition would show the same left and right material as the widescreen, plus show additional material at the top and bottom. Not so. I checked, measured, and compared a random selection of shots in both formats and found in some cases the standard screen did, indeed, display more information top and bottom while just as often losing something at one side or the other. I suspect both formats on the DVD are various trims of the original camera negative, and it's a toss-up which one reveals the more material. I watched the widescreen because that is presumably the version the director intended to be seen in theaters.

As for the image itself, it, too, is hard to describe. Following Fox's usual policy of transferring their movies to disc at a high bit rate, the colors are deep and rich, with excellent contrasts. And while the film looks generally sharp and crisp, there are noticeable edge enhancements when the characters are outdoors in bright sunlight. What's more, darker areas of the picture are not all that revealing of inner detail, and there are some small moiré effects as well as some grain present. Nothing is simple.

Audio:
Like the picture quality, the Dolby Digital 5.1 sound is at first blush crisp and clean and extremely dynamic. But somehow, like the picture, it's a little too crisp and clean for absolute realism. The surround channels nicely fill out the audio stage with sounds of wind, thunder, shattering glass, ambient music, and the like, and the bass, while not particularly deep, is undoubtedly strong.

Extras:
The extras include the usual suspects. There is an audio commentary with director Brian Helgeland, which has to be of interest to someone, perhaps Mr. Helgeland's family and friends. There are eight deleted scenes and dailies, with or without Mr. Helgeland's commentary. And there are twenty-eight scene selections and a standard-screen theatrical trailer. English and French are provided for spoken languages, English and Spanish for subtitles.

Parting Shots:
It's not that I don't enjoy nonsense, you understand. It's just that I don't enjoy nonsensical nonsense. Not even the title, "The Order," has any rational meaning in the context of the story and should have remained what it was called in Europe, "The Sin Eater," as corny as that sounds. In short, the movie makes little internal sense even for a guy more than willing to suspend his disbelief, as I was.

Oh, and remember that old Catholic chapel I mentioned in the intro, the one that made me nervous when I was a kid? Although it was already ancient when I first knew it, it continues to be used and I visited it recently for a funeral. I still found it spookier than this film.