Revival House: 'Don't Deliver Us From Evil'

'Jennifer's Body' disapoints, so here's the real evil...

Suffering a wicked deadline, and "Jennifer's Body" disapointing me on nearly every level (not scary, not funny, not compelling, not poignant), I've dipping into the archives of evil with a better teen "Body'"-- the dramatically titled, "Don't Deliver Us From Evil." A 1971 French picture that's the true blue (and blood red) of bad girl movies. And one so artistic, so subversive, so poignant, so perverse so...freakishly lovable that my ardor will never wane.

Thank heaven for evil teenage girls. Or rather, complicated teenage girls. A sub-genre of cinema I'm especially fond of, I find myself continually returning to all those sexy, young, bad girls with a certain amount of personal wonder. Why, for instance, do I love Tuesday Weld in
"Pretty Poison" so much? Or Pattty McCormack's foot stomping brilliance from "The Bad Seed?" Or all those other precocious teens -- the grumpy girls from Ghost World, the swoony swans of "My Summer of Love," the suicidal virgins, the Jolie/Frances amalgamation of "Girl, Interrupted," those murderous heavenly creatures, that smirky, Humbert temptress Lolita, that little girl who lived down the lane...and more. I see something in myself in these young ones, of course (many women do), and I admire their individualism, I'm empathetic to their struggles, even if unhealthy and tragic. After all, as "Black Snake Moan" professed, it's hard out there for a nymph.

Proof positive lies in one of my favorite "evil" girl movies, "Don't Deliver Us From Evil," a potent dose of pretty poison presented in a wonderfully deceiving package. Never released in the United States and "banned" for blasphemy, the story of two teenage convent girls who "dedicate ourselves to Satan" could have been some dippy horror movie -- a T&A fest with demons and multiple slayings and loads of sex. It could have been one of those '70s horror films that make you run for the shower directly upon watching because even your soul feels soiled (which isn't always a terrible thing).

But that's not what "Don't Deliver Us From Evil" is attempting. Really about the obsessive nature of female friendship, of girls suffering a tedious, square world filled with hypocrisy and becoming hopped up by literature and the forbidden and hellfire and all the stuff that's so intense when you're 15, the movie is a fiendish paean to the freaky bad girl -- girls who, when staring into that bland void would rather, quite literally, burn out than fade away.

Inspired by the original "Heavenly Creatures" -- Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme -- two girls whose close friendship resulted in murder, Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal (if only Serge Gainsbourg would have written their theme song) studies a female bond that twists into Sapphic love, sadism and death. More subversive than Heavenly Creatures, first time director Joel Sera considers blasphemous ideas and sequences with heroines who spit out their Communion wafers like bubble-gum and glare at their Priests while giddily spying on creepy Nuns making out in locked rooms. Heavenly? What, pray tell is that?

Read my entire piece here.