DESECRATION (1999)

Starring Irma St. Paule and Christie Sanford

Shot for $150,000 by the 28-year-old cousin of Alfred Sole, director of "Alice Sweet Alice," "Desecration" is one of the best horror films of recent years. Tragically, at the time of this writing, it had yet to find a distributor, although attendees of the 1999 FantaFestival in Rome got a gander of the move in June of 1999.

The film isn't perfect, but Tomaselli definitely exhibits a tremendous amount of style. This pic  is actually better than some of Dario Argento's movies and surpasses most of the crap being released by American horror filmmakers these days.

The film borrows liberally from "Alice Sweet Alice," a film remembered as much for its dread of Catholicism as it is for being the first movie to star Brooke Shields. In "Desecration," a Catholic school student  (Danny Lopes)  accidentally kills a nun (who has a remarkable resemblance to his deceased mother) with a motorized toy airplane. Afterwards, he naturally starts seeing the spirit of the dead nun everywhere he turns. Strange things start happening at the school. Another nun is killed by a pair of flying scissors, while one of Lopes' classmates falls through a hole, apparently falling into hell.

Lopes himself descends in to Hades for the final confrontation with his sadistic mother. Only his grandmother (St. Paule) has any clue as to what's happening: The boy's mother is trying to get out of hell through her own son. The film gets more surreal and nightmarish  as the story progresses. While it should satisfy any intelligent horror fan, the ending was a bit flat, but heck, so was the ending of the original "Nightmare on Elm Street."

Tomaselli managed to direct one hell of an atmospheric movie on a low budget. With a small number of surprisingly good actors, incredible cinematography and just a forest, the film convincingly and terrifyingly depicts a boy's descent into hell. I definitely recommend it. Here's hoping the film finds a distributor soon. The fans deserve it.