Not among the trinity of holy horrors from the late sixties and early seventies, The Sentinel takes its cues from religious horror but manages to fall into bad movie territory anyway. While still cited from time to time, it’s largely forgotten among the films of the era. It had a lot of competition in the seventies with The Exorcist, The Omen, and The Amityville Horror. One of the reasons it seems to have fallen at the threshold is that it doesn’t understand the religion it tries to portray. That religion is some form of Catholicism that involves a number of clerics who run around northern Italy wearing various liturgical vestments to oversee an apartment in Brooklyn Heights that’s actually the gateway to Hell. They do this by way of an eponymous sentinel who lives in the apartment building that’s Hell’s portal. The rest they, reasonably enough, rent out.
Alison Parker, a model, ends up renting the place while her boyfriend lawyer decides to have her killed—no particular motivation is given, although he had his first wife murdered too. At the apartment Alison is disturbed by the other tenants, who are very strange. And a mysterious priest lives in the apartment at the very top and never comes out. (In case you haven’t gathered, the plot is pretty convoluted.) It turns out that people who’ve formerly attempted suicide (like Parker) are targeted by the church to take over as sentinels to make up for their sin. They have to “go missing” and reappear as a priest or nun and live in a particular apartment. The strange neighbors, as you may have guessed, are demons trying to escape the watchful gaze of the sentinel. Naturally, they stay in the same building.
The problem—or one of them, anyway—is that the Catholicism displayed doesn’t resemble Catholicism very much. In the famous scene where the demonic entities are swarming on Alison and the dying sentinel she’s to replace, said sentinel carries a distinctly Protestant cross rather than a crucifix. The mythology the film tries to construct is simply bizarre. The classics of the period at least got the religion correct. Catholicism in The Exorcist, Protestantism in The Omen, and, although fabricated, Satanism in Rosemary’s Baby. Many filmmakers, it seems, think it’s easy to fake it when it comes to religion. Looking at the movies that succeed on that front, however, and comparing them to those that become bad movies, it seems clear that doing your homework, or at least going to Sunday school, pays off.
