I have fairly fond memories of F. Paul Wilson's campy little early-90s novella Midnight Mass. I'm not saying the book is high art, but it's a fun little story in the tradition of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend that imagines a vampire-ruled earth and the efforts of a few remaining humans to wrench back a little piece of it. The cool thing about that original story is its central relationship between a devout rabbi and a hip young priest, old friends from way back who've always enjoyed a good theological discussion over some good beer. It's that integral friendship that made the novella something mildly special in the midst of all those terrible vampire stories of that era. Their unlikely friendship gave the rabbi and priest the inner strength to take on their impossible adversaries—the legion of undead that had taken over the priest's small church.

So it was with happy anticipation that I opened up the DVD of a movie based on F. Paul Wilson's novella. I felt sure that, in the right hands, Midnight Mass could make a potentially great film. So I plopped the disc into the player, settled back with a fellow F. Paul Wilson fan, and let the images flow.

Dear God.

What have they done with Midnight Mass?

I'm not sure exactly how to begin critiquing this film, for the simple reason that it's by no means a professional production and in fact doesn't even aspire to the filmmaking heights of 8mm student films you might have seen. Midnight Mass, in the hands of director Tony Mandile, isn't so much a disaster as a homegrown collaborative jumble that never should have seen the light of day. It's loaded with terrible acting, has zero sense of pace or action, looks as if it was filmed in a high-school gymnasium, and has no grasp of film technique, as if its creators have knelt before the altar of horror fiction and film but haven't bothered to learn the craft or language of either.

You know those awful, earnest backyard films made by aspiring Fangoria-makeup types? Those films that feature lots of rubber appliances on lumbering "actors" who talk unintelligibly through their masks? Well, Midnight Mass isn't even as enjoyably bad as those films.

But perhaps the worst, most damning problem with the filmed Midnight Mass concerns the contributions of its cowriter—yes, that's right, F. Paul Wilson. He has cowritten the screenplay with Mandile, and for some insane reason has removed the very lifeblood of the story by hacking out the character of the rabbi. (For information about his reasoning, see the What Else Is There? section below.) The rabbi is completely gone, and in his place is a hysterical drama-queen "atheist" (self-proclaimed) in the form of Gwen (Pamela Karp), who is now the unlikely friend of our hero Father Joe (Douglas Gibson, in a performance that's above this film). You're left wondering, Who is this girl and why should I care about her? Oh, for the love of Jehovah, where the hell is the rabbi? Changing the rabbi into the shrieking, twitchy Gwen robs the story of everything.

The flaws only begin at that central one. There are so many problems inherent in this low-rent mish-mash that it boggles the mind. Not one character is properly introduced. There is a disorienting lack of establishing shots. The vampires are all mindless zombie-beasts, except—conveniently—for the coherent Father Palmieri (an obscenely overacting Marvin Schwartz). Every single scene feels slapped together on-the-fly, with no real attention paid to framing, lighting, sound, blocking, acting, movement, or background action.

In one signature shot, our two heroes are walking along a beach, mourning humanity, and we see, off in the distance, some remaining humans enjoying the outdoors: They are three idiots throwing rocks at a low-flying box kite and laughing like yokels. Yes, the last gasp of humankind, that final warm-blooded vestige of a doomed race, is a drunken group of buffoons. And in the end, maybe that's why Wilson has butchered his novella and permitted Mandile to film this dismal piece of "cinema." Perhaps, 20 years after writing the source story, Wilson believes there are no longer any humans worth saving from a vampire Armageddon. And this is his way of taking it out on us.

Lions Gate presents Midnight Mass in a dreary anamorphic-widescreen transfer of the film's original 1.85:1 presentation. The transfer seems to offer accurate colors, for what they are, but some scenes are washed out. There's a general softness to the image, making the film appear flat and uninvolving. I noticed many, many instances of blocking and other digital artifacting, and I also observed minimal halos. Shadow detail is poor, making the overlit and underlit shots even more noticeable, and the image contains significant grain

The disc's Dolby Digital 2.0 track is a hollow thing that offers tinny dialog directly from the center. There's no low end. There's no surround activity. The score by John Angier fares the best, but I must mention the wholly inappropriate guitar music that plays over the montage in which the defiled church is cleaned up.

Watching the array of supplements on the Midnight Mass disc is a fairly painful experience. It amounts to a group of people who are undoubtedly energetic and proud of what they've created, but they can't seem to grasp that they've created a turd.

First up are some Bloopers & Outtakes, a little over 2 minutes worth of actors flubbing their lines or tumbling out of frame or otherwise screwing up.

Behind the Camera is a 38-minute (!) look at the making of this mess. Truth be told, I found some of this piece quite revealing, particularly the interview segments with author F. Paul Wilson, who talks at length about, essentially, destroying the imperative central relationship within the story (between the rabbi and the priest)—all because of bowing to some perceived (imagined?) pressure from the Jewish community. We also learn that the director is a long-time friend of Wilson's. You can kind of see, at this point, how this unfortunate project came to light. There are more than a few people in denial inside this documentary, and it becomes painful to listen to Wilson praise these efforts while talking about how his novel The Keep was "raped and sodomized" by Hollywood. He says he'd rather see a film that's true to his original story than make a lot of money, but the great, crushing irony is that in Midnight Mass, he's helped produce a film that desecrates his original novella, thanks in no small part to his own tinkering of the script! Anyway, my thoughts about Wilson aside, this documentary offers a lot of short, grainy interviews with the central cast and crew, but you'll be hard-pressed to stick this one out. By the time the lead actress starts talking about how her character is manic depressive, as if to forgive some of the shrillness of her onscreen persona, you might have already run screaming from the room.

Production Art & Stills is an unfortunate hodgepodge of doodles and masks.

Finally, the Production Commentary with the director, producer, and star is a thing of burbling insanity that you'll listen to in quiet, disbelieving amazement. At one point, the producer says Midnight Mass is the "greatest film ever made," and the director agrees, "At least until Midnight Mass 2." The only feasible reaction to such oblivious comments is to study the intentions of the participants. I mean, they're putting us on, right? It's all a rib-poke, ain't it? We're the butt of a cruel joke perpetrated by the equivalent of those rock-throwing buffoons. Once you give this a listen from that perspective, you might have a few laughs.

There's a certain anger that bubbles up inside you when you realize that Lions Gate has ponied up the cash to distribute this hopelessly amateur production when it could have backed something like, say, Bubba Ho-Tep. Avoid Midnight Mass at all costs, and instead search out a copy of the original novella—or better yet, Matheson's great vampire novel I Am Legend.