Review: ABBEY OF THELEMA

Oh Sweet Baby Jesus!  Being a horror fan comes with its stereotypes.  I wanted to start off this review with a personal note.

When we received this film for review, Travis – our head honcho – contacted me because the plot deals with Aleister Crowley.  If you don’t know, Aleister Crowley was an esoteric individual who dealed with the occult and founded a religious philosophy call Thelema.  People still practice in this belief today.  Travis figured that with the name Crowley popping up in the plot, which is usually entangled and mentioned with the occult and horror films, that this would be a film up my alley, or at least, I would be interested in reviewing it.

The plot, which is beat into your head as actual events, chronicles Crowley’s life shortly after WWI when he was a painter.  From there, he becomes sexually entangled with a few of his models that he used for his paintings.  One of them, Leah, becomes pregnant with Crowley’s child.  The other, Ninette, becomes possessive over Crowley and becomes obsessed with Crowley’s religious beliefs as Crowley tries to create a house for his followers – The Abbey of Thelema.

Quite honestly, I might not be giving the plot that much justice but on the same token, the film doesn’t give Crowley much justice either.  The very little I do know about the actual Aleister Crowley is that a lot of his beliefs influenced filmmakers and artists world wide – mainly in England.  This film essentially feels like using the history of Crowley’s sexual escapades to give the main actor a reason to make out with girls that probably wouldn’t give him the time of day.

The film’s production values are amateurish, the writing is horrendous and the execution of the whole film is just god awful.  I have seen better films made in 24 hours than this piece.  Oh, Ron Jeremy…he is in the film for about 5 minutes or so and his scenes as a priest – which I thought was funny on paper – really don’t add to the story plus they were obviously filmed in a cheap hotel room in order to use Jeremy’s name to sell copies.

Even if a film is bad, I can usually find good qualities about it.  Sometimes, bad movies can be a laugh riot (Look at TROLL 2).  However, this is a bad movie that is also boring and painful to look at.

Overall Rating: 0 out of 5.  If a copy comes near you, burn it!

P.S. The music is credited as by “THE DEVIL”.  I really was hoping the dude would have been a better composer.