Revelation
 (1999)
review by Suspiriorum

Let this be a lesson to you about the perils of on-line DVD rental. I wanted to rent Revelation, Stuart Urban’s 2001 apocalyptic horror starring Terence Stamp, Derek Jacobi, & Udo Kier. What turns up is Revelation, a 1999 TV movie “starring” Jeff Fahey. Which after watching it, I discover is actually the second part of the Apocalypse trilogy, a series of Christian films dealing with, um, the apocalypse. Ooooh, those DVD people will pay for this one. I think I’ll stick a nasty surprise in the box when I return it ASAP. That’ll learn them good & proper! It’s not a good start when the film has pissed you off just for simply being, before you even start to watch it, so maybe therefore it’s not actually as bad as it seemed to me. Yeah, right. Still, since it actually arrived, I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt & actually watch it (before I realised what is actually was). More fool me.

The film opens upon Therold Stone (Fahey), who is watching film of his wife & daughter, & crying. Never seen that one before. Well, when we see the (oh-so “moving”) flashback of them actually dying I genuinely hadn’t. They didn’t die, exactly. They just vanished. No, no, really. One moment the two women in his life were standing in front of him, the next they literally disappeared into thin air. Well, hey! happens to me all the time. I’m beginning to think that there’s some kind of Bermuda Triangle in the Ladies toilets. But I digress.

It seems that this has happened all over the world – millions of people simply vanished. And at the same time, rose the “Messiah”, who everyone believes to be God, who got rid of all the nuclear weapons, & made society a loved-up & generally nice place. Except, of course, for those who worship God, who he has persecuted & killed. And no one seems to question for a moment that just maybe he might be the Antichrist. Now maybe this might have worked had we seen how this came about (which I guess may have happened in the first film, although I don’t care enough to seek it out), with great potential for an obvious Nazi Germany parallel, but no. We’re dropped into the middle of it, & it seems to make perfect sense to everyone. Well, everyone except the viewer, obviously, because no one else seems to have noticed that all the people who vanished were also God worshippers as well. What’s going on is pretty clear from early on to anyone who’s read a bit of the book of Revelation (that’s a section of the bible), or indeed anyone who’s seen The Omen trilogy.

Anyway, then we get the main plot (with occasional superfluous “action scenes” that consists of people fire pop-guns at each other) in which policeman/agent Fahey has to go on the run from his former employers after being framed, & takes refuge with the God worshippers who he formerly had orders to kill & persecute. He also carries a disc containing vital information to what the Messiah’s plan for the forthcoming “Day of Wonders”. Decoding this disc involves getting help from the guy who seems to be the only computer programmer left (unless I missed something), who was co-incidentally, the man who programmed the system that the disc is to run on. I don’t know quite how this one guy in a wheelchair managed to programme the whole system on his own, but he must have started when he was a baby, I reckon. He also gets to sprout some supposedly amusing lines, such as:

“If a man speaks in a forest with no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?”

Ow, I do apologise, but I think my sides have just split.

And is if that wasn’t enough, he is also the stepsister of the most wanted woman in the world, who is leader of the rebel alliance. Now, I don’t know who’s in charge of the personnel department at the Messiah’s HQ, but I hope he’s now picking lemons in Antarctica after that one. And since this is such a vitally important disc, the Messiah sends two whole agents from the legions at his disposal, but they then disappear from the narrative having been foxed by a cunning ploy involving a dog & a series of lampposts.

And since the film was made in 1999, year of The Matrix, & the filmmakers want to appear “cool” & “hip”, the means by which the Messiah is going about his devious plan involves a deceptively realistic virtual reality environment. There’s a weird fear of technology in this film. Don’t you trust those computers, you. They’re evil, I tells you. Although saying it’s a fear implies that it might be scary. The only thing about this film that frightened me was how it managed to get inside my DVD player.

Now this cliché-free plotting might have been some cop if we’d had some decent scripting & characters to keep us interested. But no, the “characters” mostly exist just to sprout a particular viewpoint, or provide some stilted exposition. Occasionally there threatens to be an intelligent theological discussion on the nature of God, but it never goes beyond the “Ladybird book of religion” level, & of course there’s no question that there (gulp) might not actually be a God. And one of the “characters” is a typically unstereotyped God-loving, gospel-singing black woman, who gets to lead a vomit-inducing love-in sing-along of Amazing Grace at the climax. Praise the Lord, sister!

In fact, the most objectionable thing about Revelation is its absurdly heavy-handed religious preaching. The film seems to have basically been made simply to try to con people into watching it, & then convert those people into being believers, with all the subtlety of a giant concrete donkey dropping from an passing flying saucer onto your head. Even real-life televangelists are roped in - & stupid me had thought that they couldn’t get at me over here in the UK. Shows what I know, & frankly it pissed me off. And I should point out that I am by no means anti-Christian but having this sermonising forced down my throat under the pretence of entertainment is more that I can stand. I can’t send this film to hell unfortunately, but I would if I could. I just hope that I never have to endure the clumsy heavy-handed sermonising of the other two films as well. The third one apparently managed to rope in Gary Busey & Margot Kidder, but I don’t care. If I ever see it on a shelf anywhere, I won’t be held responsible for my actions.

I’ve been force-fed (actually, foodstuffs might have been a better use for this disc than entertainment) the UK R2/PAL disc released by Planet DVD. The 4:3 (correct for a TVM) picture varies in quality wildly from some excellent moments to some horribly grainy moments that could easily be on VHS. Certain scenes seem to have a couple of frames missing too, but that might have been a stylistic thing, I couldn’t tell. The audio is much better, with a clear 2.0 track that makes good use of Gary Koftinoff’s neat but occasionally overbearing score. The only extra is a shoddy trailer that very nearly managed to persuade me not to watch the film. Still, if you’re seriously considering watching this DVD then frankly it probably means that you’re not too picky anyway. Someone’s going to pay for getting me to watch this.