Priest (2011) is what I had hoped was a movie treatment of Garth Ennis’s Priest. There are several similarities: vampires, a priest with a cross embossed on his forehead, and a tall, unstoppable man with a cowboy hat and slicker who looks suspiciously like the Saint of Killers. But there the resemblance ends. It’s a completely different story.
In this universe, Earth has been ravaged by centuries of war between vampires and humans. Humans won by becoming a theocracy: a Catholic-run state that used super-soldier priests to gain the upper hand and push the vamps back into special reserves. Meanwhile, humanity has disappeared behind the walls of fortified religious cities and lives in dystopian squalor. The priests, no longer needed, have become useless and ignored.
A horde of vampires attacks a farm outside the cities, killing the parents and kindnapping the daughter. The daughter’s uncle, a priest living in Cathedral City (sector twelve), breaks his vows (which have become nothing more than just obeying the all-powerful monsignors) and leaves the city to rescue his niece.
Vampires are a different breed here: more like rejects from the Doom video game – eyeless and larval things that move with the speed of sound. But now they have a half-human, half-vampire priest (he’s the guy who looks like the Saint of Killers) who can walk during the day, and he’s become a vampire Bin Laden, organizing a bloodsucker commuter train through the outside settlements and into Cathedral City. The vampires build massive hives (think of the Doom video game) out of their own slimy secretions (Think Aliens), and they have a Queen who has some sort of royal-jelly-blood that can somehow make super vamp/human hybrids who can really rock a Stetson hat.
Priest is of many countless amalgams of horror and Manga. The source is a graphic novel by Min-Woo Hung, and even then, the influences of Manga and horror fragment even more. Many of the great cowboy movies (The Magnificent Seven, and other Spaghetti westerns) take their inspiration from old Samurai movies. In turn, much of modern horror has become a steam-punky smorgasbord of fancy cowboy outfits (here the fancy cowboy outfits are mixed with a priest uniform and the combo works), fancy blades, and somewhat muted martial arts fight scenes, mixed with magic and monsters. The climax is a Great Train Robbery, except with vampires and Matrix-style hand-to-hand battles.
Priest is too much ten different movies and genres and not enough its own animal. The concept – a world overtaken by monsters and religion – is solid and workable, but the director got too mixed up in iconography and iconoclasm to let that concept fly.
For those wanting a good romp with dark imagery, fighting and monsters (that don’t really resemble vampires), this is the movie for you. Catholics and filmgoers who want something more, go elsewhere.
