BELLS OF INNOCENCE

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Mike "son of Chuck" co-wrote BELLS OF INNOCENCE, which makes it a pretty good bet that he's the reason Chuck himself provides a supporting role in this peculiar Christian-fantasy flick.

BELLS is far from the worst film I've ever seen, but it also lacks the imagination of some of the really demented celluloid conceptions. It's your basic "faith of the common man" trope, in that three ordinary guys are hijacked by an angel of God (Chuck himself) so that these virtuous mortals can fight the forces of Lucifer in a podunk version of Armageddon.

Two of the guys, Oren and Conrad, really just there for main character Jux (Mike Norris) to talk to while they try to figure what's happened to them. Jux alone gets a backstory: he's first seen flashing back to the accidental death of his little daughter, after which he's deeply tempted to eat a pistol. But some better angel of his nature wins out and he refrains. Then he and his two comrades, who seem to be Bible salesmen, load their wares in a plane and take off. However, the plane inexplicably loses power and they're forced to land in a desert.

The trio walks to the only town in sight, given the curious name of Ceres. (No one troubles to explain the provenance of the name, which is the same as the Roman goddess of grain.) The outsiders have various unsettling encounters with the strange inhabitants of Ceres as they to find their way back to civilization. Oren and Conrad still don't get to do anything interesting, but Jux meets a young prepubescent girl, Lyric, who reminds him of his lost daughter.

Matthew (the name of Chuck's Angel) reveals to the trio that long ago the town was taken over by the forces of Satan, led by a greybearded fellow named Emeritus. The Satanic minions take particular pleasure in bending the town's children to their will in weird rituals, and Lyric is one of the kids who's been turned. Not only must the trio face down the henchmen of Satan, Jux must (for some strange reason) choose his deceased daughter Amy over the evil that is Lyric. The forces of Satan are defeated by some rigamarole, which involves some Christian church bells heard by the trio when they first came to Ceres. 

Then Jux wakes up back in the hotel room. Yay, it was all a dream! Except that Lyric, who wasn't saved by the victory of the faithful, appears in Jux's room and shoots him dead. But this is a good thing, since it means that the distressed dad is able to join his angelic real daughter in the afterlife. Wait-- what?

Clearly the writers of BELLS just tossed a bunch of vaguely Christian tropes together as in a blender, possibly with the idea that Real Christians Don't Insist on Consistency. I'm in no way opposed to even simplistic treatments of the basic "good vs. evil" struggle. But I can't see how this grab-bag approach would have persuaded anyone to join any hypothetical flocks.