Stigmata

Hollywood seems to have it in for the Roman Catholic Church. Recently there was Detroit Rock City, a certified dud that poked fun at a sex-hungry priest and church rituals. Now there’s Stigmata, an off-base low blow at the values and beliefs of Catholicism.

Moral and spiritual arguments aside, it’s the movie’s promotional slogan "It will scare the hell into you" that gets my goat. Let’s rephrase that to "It will bore the living tar out of you." If you see Stigmata on the same day as the really spooky Stir of Echoes, the latter film wins on all counts.

Stigmata follows the ordeal of an atheistic hair stylist in Pittsburgh named Frankie Paige (Patricia Arquette). Frankie has bloody stigmatic wounds identical to those of Jesus on the cross. She is also suffering spastic fits since receiving a mysterious cross from her vacationing mother in Brazil.

Frankie does her best Linda Blair bit by freaking out in the bathtub, a night club, and a subway car along with several ill-advised jaunts out into high-speed traffic that cause numerous wrecks. Nope, her head doesn’t spin around, Exorcist-style. Frankie does a neat trick, however, by showing just the white of her eyes while rambling away in Aramaic. Where’s a cop when you need one?

After each possession episode Frankie shows up at the beauty shop, ready for her clients. Work chums greets her as if it were just another day. Were I the salon owner, I’d have given serious consideration to locking her up in the storage closet, bound and gagged. Have you checked the cost of worker’s compensation lately?

I won’t give away the plot. The Vatican, on top of the developments, jumps into the controversy. An evil cardinal (Jonathan Pryce) sends Father Andrew Kiernan (Gabriel Byrne) to investigate Frankie. Byrne, a superb actor totally out of place in this ostentatious flick, has to be saying to himself, "My career has come down to this?"