The Convent opens innocently enough, a church service is in progress with lots of nuns and a priest when in the front door walks a young lady dressed in school uniform, but wearing sunglasses and packing heat. She shoots the nuns, sets the priest on fire then shoots him, and kicks the still-living and smashes them over their heads with baseball bats. Take that, evil Christians!

We zoom 40 years into ‘the present’, and Clarissa (Joanna Canton) waits outside her sorority house for her friends. They plan on beating one another fraternity to tainting the old abandoned convent’s belltower with graffiti. Her old goth friend Mo (Megahn Perry) turns up, begging for a ride to the convent to see if its haunted like local urban legend says. Unwilling due to the rather cliquish nature of her friends – her boyfriend Chad; idiot cheerleader Kaitlin and her jock boyfriend Biff; druggie black-wannabe Frijole; and her geeky younger brother Brant who thinks the guys are going to let him join their fraternity – she’s blackmailed into it when Mo threatens to reveal Clarissa’s days as a crazy rocker. Frijole takes a liking to Mo and claims that all he needs is five minutes alone with her, even though they think she’s a lesbian. So off the merry band go towards the old abandoned convent, only pausing at a house a long the way to fill in some more back story.

It seems the occupant of the house, who goes by the name of Christine, had gone into the convent school at which she boarded and wiped out all the nuns – ah, the young lady from the start of the film! She was locked up in a mental institution for many years, and herself had become part of urban legend. Arriving at the convent, they get inside and Mo gives us some more back story, that Christine was pregnant, possibly by the priest himself, and that he and the nuns had caused a gory abortion (I hope the Pope doesn’t find out about this) and motivated Christine to go on the killing spree that followed. They split up and go for a wander around the convent, and being a horror movie the two couples try to get a little frisky, things not going well for Chad when Clarissa freaks, seeing a ghostly nun figure which suddenly disappears again. Clarissa is perturbed, exclaiming that the nun looked “all gross and f**ked up”, but Chad, like the typical clueless boyfriend who’s going to die, convinces her its nothing. Meanwhile Frijole is smoking a joint and hitting on Mo, unsuccessfully, when the campus security show up and order the youths outside. Mo persuades Frijole to cover for her, she’s already on probation, and the rest are interrogated and sent on their merry way by the security guys, one of which was COOLIO! Mo watches everyone leave, only to be snatched from behind by parties unknown.

The rest of the group chill out at a diner, but two problems remain. Clarissa wants to go back for Mo, fearing she may be raped or killed or whatnot. Frijole seems to do a better job of persuading everyone to go back with his reason though, he was setting up a deal with someone for some illegal substances, and he hid his whole stash in the convent when the security turned up. So back they go and of course they split up in the hope of finding the stash, and Mo quicker. Frijole’s novel searching technique seems to involve downing some magic mushrooms, and one can’t help think that might do him any favours later. We find Mo first, however, and she is in the hands of a small group of wannabe Satanists, led by the melodramatic Saul (David Gunn) and flanked by the very camp Dickie Boy and two blonde chicks (one of which wrote and produced the movie, incidentally). After daring to disparage the name of Saul, son of Satan and Lord of the 13th Coven (and Dairy Queen employee), she is sacrificed and, zut alores, she is turned into a deadly undead demon chick. Saul and Dickie Boy make a run for it, while the two blondes are dispatched and themselves become undead demon chicks. Of course as usual, the demons need a human sacrifice, and unfortunately for Brant, that’s him. Everybody else wanders around totally unaware at the great danger that awaits, and the truth of Christine’s killing spree all those years ago comes to light, as the blood flows.

I have three words to describe this movie – FUN, FUN, FUN!!! The plot is about as hackneyed as they come, but that’s the whole point! The dialogue is fantastic, the characters are hilarious, and the gore is plentiful, this is all one could hope for in a contemporary piece of schlock horror. Mike Mendez has worked wonders with a limited budget and short period of time in which to film, and managed to give the film a distinctive style through the use of stop motion photography and loadsa ultraviolet lighting. The frenetic pace at which it all runs once the demons start causing carnage reminded me of Evil Dead 2, and indeed the combination of humour and over-the-top cartoonish gore and violence certainly smacks of some Raimi inspiration, only with an original flourish of two of its own.

Pretty much everyone in this movie is great, Chaton Anderson’s screenplay is full of colourful characters and the interplay between them is extremely entertaining (just wait until you see Dickie Boy’s idea for preventing the demons from sacrificing Brant, it’s a doozy!). Despite having few credits to any of their names, this plucky band of young actors work their socks off, most notable being Megahn Perry’s Mo and the campy satanist duo of Saul and Dickie Boy (Kelly Mantle) who provide some golden moments of comic relief. Adrienne Barbeau gleefully overacts as the adult Christine, kicking major demon ass with a motor cycle and a slew of weaponry.

This really is a visually and aurally striking horror movie, one that I cannot do justice to with mere words and screen captures, so at this point I shall merely urge you to seek out this film. Sure it’s not perfect, like the sloppy piece of editing when two of the characters talk about being “accosted by giant bugs”, unless this just all happened off camera and I’m just being anal. Anyway, yes, Mike Mendez and Chaton Anderson have created one of the most fun horror movies to come out of the western hemisphere since Bruce Campbell fought the undead, and you would be awfully silly to miss out on this witty, well made, gory opus.