St. Agatha

Tits on a dish.

Saint Agatha was a third century Christian martyr, who took a sacred vow of virginity at the age of 15. This annoyed some jerk named Quintianus who really wanted to fuck marry her, so he had her tortured and raped before finally ordering her tits to be cut off. Agatha is now the patron saint of rape victims, breast cancer patients, martyrs, wet nurses, bell-founders, bakers, fire, earthquakes, and eruptions of Mount Etna. She also has absolutely nothing to do with this movie. 

Truth be told, this movie doesn't even have anything to do with this movie. It touts itself as a horror movie on Netflix, but it's not. You think maybe "Oooh, haunted convent!" but no. Then maybe you're tempted to believe that you're in for a "secret coven of witchy Satanic nuns" but you're wrong again. All St. Agatha turns out to be is a slightly more sadistic retelling of the Georgia Tann story, the Depression era baby broker who had several episodes of Unsolved Mysteries episodes made about her and the many lives she ruined. 

St. Agatha is the uneven story of teenage Mary, a poor, white trash Southern girl whose momma is dead, whose daddy is a no-good drunkard who likes to use his fists, and whose boyfriend Jimmy is just really annoying and dumb. For some reason, Mary has a cute baby brother who is killed off in a dumb accident while Mary screws Jimmy in the next room. It's the first of many unnecessary plot devices that pop up during the course of this film, do nothing to drive the story along and then disappear altogether. There's absolutely no reason for Baby Brother to ever have existed, except to pop up in one lame nightmare sequence.

Mary gets herself knocked up good and runs off with Jimmy to start a new life in another crappy Southern town, where their main source of income is running rigged poker games in divey juke joints and conning dumb crackers out of their money. For some reason that failed to stick with me, Jimmy has to blow town and abandons Mary at a soup kitchen, where a seemingly kindly nun slips her a card and a promise to help her. Following the address on the card, Mary finds herself at an isolated convent/home for unwed mothers, where she is offered food, shelter and a safe place to give birth when the time comes. 

But things are not what they seem! Because of course they aren't. This wants to be a horror movie so bad, but it really doesn't know how to deliver. It offers us creepy noises coming from the attic, but never follows up on who or what is up there. There are scenes of faceless nuns and hooded boogeymen wandering around at night, being creepy, but there's no real reason for this spookshow shit at all. It's suggested that the Mother Superior (actually a very entertaining character portrayed by a delightfully sadistic Carolyn Hennesy) is doing all of this crazy shit in an effort to make the girls question their sanity and appear unstable, but considering we've already seen her and her fellow Sisters of Sadism threatening and beating the girls, forcing one to cut off her tongue and another to eat her own vomit, are the haunted house tactics really necessary?

No. They're not. There's no big spooky secret waiting to be revealed here, no diabolical plot, just a bunch of evil, greedy women selling babies to the highest bidders. It's a story that could have been told without all of the Halloween window dressing, but let's be real, it still wouldn't have been very good no matter what genre it tried to cram itself into. 


Just a couple of glaring errors I'd like to point out...

#1 - The term "gaslighting" did not exist back then, and wouldn't have for at least another forty years.

#2 - Why is one woman shown ingesting rat poison and collapsing almost instantly while another wanders around for damn near half an hour and finally has to be manually strangled to death?

#3 - Who was in the attic, for fucks sake? We see a face peering down from the holes in the ceiling but are never told who was up there, or why.

#4 - What exactly was the point of trying to force Mary to change her name?

#5 - The use of obviously modern money in a movie set in the 1940s. That was just sloppy. You couldn't afford to just print out pictures of bills made back then? 

#6 - Who the hell was the black guy? Did they just forget about him? 

#7 - The whole convoluted escape plan and the final scene, wherein nothing is explained, no payoff is forthcoming and all of the loose ends are left dangling in the breeze. Why the hell did I just waste time watching this when we never find out what happens to Mary and her baby, or the evil Mother Superior? 

I don't know who the critics were whose quotes appear on the film poster, but this movie is not brilliant, or smart, or terrifying. It's clumsy, slow and has a serious identity problem. And the worst part? Nobody's tits get cut off. A great opportunity, pissed away. 

By the way; did you know that on St Agatha's Feast Day, little cakes called Agatha Buns, made to look like tits, are served in her honor? Complete with cherries for nipples? Now that's horror.