Summary: Ex-detective (maybe) turned Franciscan monk (barely) Sean Connery teams up with a super young femme-faced Christian Slater to form a crime solving duo investigating unusual deaths at a particularly scary monastery run by a blind head monk played by the always amusing William Hickey (one crazy summer, my blue heaven).
As I watched this film, I was reminded of a couple of things:
1. "Don't judge a book by it's cover" Hollywood in the 80's (and for decades before that) really did not reinforce this idea. In many movies you can spot the bad guy right away, he is angry looking deformed one or the one driving a muscle car with a skull on it. The monks in the order under investigation are horrifyingly ugly. I mean these monks look like total shit, hair all disheveled, eyes all fucked up, over weight and sweaty. The naturally strange looking Ron Perlman is particularly jacked, missing patches of hair and sporting a large hump. Clearly there is some evil going on in that place.
2.
3. In the 80's there were two foes: the Russians and the Devil.
This movie has enough secret invisible writings, evasive powerful monks, banned books, pedophiles, ciphers, pupilless eyes, suicides, punishments of sinful flesh, forbidden libraries, Inquisitions, and secret crypt passageways to make Dan Brown cream his pants.
Did I mention there is also some soft-core porn featuring a barely legal Christian Slater AND F. Murray Abraham (amadeus, scarface) as the king of the evil monks/Connery's arch nemesis? Yeah.
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