Mark Kermode review of The Passion of the Christ

On Saturday I mentioned Newsnight Review on The Passion of the Christ, which featured film critic Mark Kermode. Yesterday's Observer features his review:

Drenched in the blood of Christ
Mel Gibson's Passion is the ultimate horror movie, steeped in guts and gore. Our reviewer, a regular churchgoer, found it shocking... but utterly compelling
Mark Kermode

The article reveals that Kermode is working on a Channel 4 documentary on Gibson. A couple of excerpts from this very interesting take on the film, one of the most positive I have seen, and in its own way quite funny:

. . . . . Ultimately, for all the theological bluster and intense inter-faith arguments which it has provoked, The Passion seems to me a quintessential horror film, a visceral cinematic assault which is no more or less 'Christian' than Ken Russell's The Devils or Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. All are examples of extreme movie-making from flamboyant film-makers who are passionately obsessed with the mysteries of Catholicism. But all are also rooted in the saleable aesthetic of the carnival sideshow; promising the audience an eye-opening spectacle of grotesque proportions.

Fainthearted viewers of The Passion who have so far avoided the fleshy shocks of gore cinema may find themselves mentally reciting that old monster movie mantra: 'It's only a movie, it's only a movie...' If there is a lesson I would wish such viewers to take away from Gibson's bloody epic it is that, contrary to the hollerings of the Daily Mail, the pleasures of horror cinema are not primarily sadistic but masochistic. One woman in Wichita has already reportedly expired during a screening of The Passion, inspiring breathless Exorcist-style press stories of the life-threatening powers of the film. All of which will doubtless add to its crowd-pulling clout . . . . .

Like me and about seven other people in the UK, Kermode is a credit-watcher. (Note to everyone else: you often miss interesting little post-credit sequences in your rush to the car park). He is the first person to have spotted this:

Elsewhere in the credits we find make-up effects stalwarts Keith VanderLaan and Greg Cannom, horror graduates who honed their skills on shockers such as the vampiric epic Bram Stoker's Dracula and the grisly modern-gothic chiller Hannibal.

And one more excerpt from the conclusion to the review:

To someone who believes in the invigorating power of extreme cinema, it seems entirely fitting that Gibson has leaned so heavily upon the horror genre to express his clearly tortured Christian faith. When the evangelist Billy Graham (who famously condemned The Exorcist as 'evil') likens The Passion of the Christ to 'a lifetime of sermons', I hear a man experiencing a Damascene (if probably temporary) conversion to the transcendent power of shocking cinema. As an unrepentant gore-geek, I have no problem with the unremitting physicality of The Passion, and admire the dexterity with which it ruthlessly terrorises its audience. Yet any sense that Christianity has less to do with enduring sublime suffering than with helping the poor and needy seems lost in the anguished howl of the film. Personally I have found more of religious substance in the 'secular' prison drama of The Shawshank Redemption, or the strangely comedic ramblings of the cult psychological thriller The Ninth Configuration.

In the end, Gibson has created an exploitation movie par excellence, fittingly shot in Italy whose national cinema has produced both Pasolini's The Gospel According to Saint Matthew and Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, those twin visions of heaven and hell between which The Passion of the Christ ultimately falls.