The Rosary Murders

Though not as riveting as its premise will have you believe, The Rosary Murders still manages to deliver moments of tension & suspense within a monotonously executed drama and is anchored by Donald Sutherland's measured performance as a conflicted priest. A run-of-the-mill effort at best when it comes to direction, the story is undone by its long runtime, an unnecessary subplot that goes nowhere & more but the mood & build-up before the serial killings is done well and the dilemma our protagonist faces is rendered with sincerity, along with the conflicted interpretation of Church law & teachings. However, the picture as a whole needed a tightly-edited plot to keep things interesting throughout and carries the look n feel of a TV film in more ways than one.

Donald Sutherland plays Father Robert Koesler, a priest in Detroit who hears the confession of a murderer who is going around offing various priests and nuns. After doing some amateur sleuthing, Koesler figures out who the killer is. But he's bound by church law to say nothing. His superiors - among them, the hard nosed, conservative Ted Nabors (Charles Durning) - believe that nothing can violate the sanctity of the confessional. So, as you can guess, Koesler is a very troubled man. Koznicki (Josef Sommer), the detective on the case, is not as concerned with the rules of the Catholic church, aiming to catch himself a killer.

This sure sounds like a neat premise for a thriller, but on the whole the story isn't told in a particularly interesting way. The subplot of a potential romance, between Koesler and Pat Lennon (a reasonably appealing Belinda Bauer), really doesn't add anything to the material. Fred Walton ("When a Stranger Calls" '79, "April Fool's Day" '86) directs with competence and gives the proceedings a very somber quality. On location shooting ("The Rosary Murders" was actually filmed in Detroit) helps a bit, although the story doesn't exactly hold any surprises. (The killer turns out to be a truly disgusting piece of work.) That's too bad, considering that the two credited screenwriters are director Walton and the great author Elmore Leonard. There is a moment around the one hour mark that struck this viewer as simply too hard to swallow.

There are some solid actors and familiar faces among the cast: Anita Barone, Rex Everhart, Stefan Gierasch, Tom Mardirosian, Mark Margolis, James Murtaugh, Lupe Ontiveros, Addison Powell. But the movie is anchored the most by Sutherland, who plays Koesler as an easygoing, likable chap with a fairly progressive and compassionate attitude.

He and Durning manage to make this worth seeing.

Six out of 10.

Is this a giallo? A neo-noir? A detective story? Let's not play with labels. Let's just see it for what it is — a whodunit where priests and nuns are the victims of a serial killer who leaves a black rosary on their dead bodies.

Directed by Fred Walton (When a Stranger Calls) and adapted by Elmore Leonard, this is a dark, rough take on William X. Kienzie's novel (Kienzie left the Catholc priesthood in 1974 after 20 years due to the Church's refusal to remarry divorced people). This may have been the only movie concerning the detective skills of Father Robert Koesler (Donald Sutherland), but the character appeared in twenty three more novels from Kienzie.

The character is a progressive priest — even falling for a reporter, Pat Lennon (Belinda Bauer, RoboCop 2, Flashdance). He serves with Father Ted Nabors (Charles Durning, Tootsie), who is the exact opposite — a racist throwback to pre-Vatican 2 who follows the Church to the letter of the law.

The central dilemma of the film? The killer confesses to Koesler, who can't do anything about it, thanks to the Church's Seal of Confession. But what if other lives — maybe even his own — are in danger?

The film was shot on location at Detroit's Holy Redeemer Parish, and if you look hard enough, you'll see an uncredited Jack White — years before The White Stripes — as an altar boy. That feels like it should be an urban legend, but it is true.

The film has what some describe as a leaden pace. There are some great moments in it, such as when Koesler hears the killer in a cemetery and the ending, where the real killer is revealed. I'm always debating with myself whether or not to spoil the ending. It's a thirty year old movie, but I feel weird doing so here. Must be the Catholic in me.

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I grew up in Detroit, so it's surprising that I've never seen this film. I played college baseball, and one of the guys on our team went to high school at Holy Redeemer (the church in this movie), so it was interesting to me in that way, as I'd never seen this church before.

The thing that bothered me as the movie ended is why the killer was killing Catholic priests and nuns. Maybe it was there and I missed it, but the end of the movie left me thinking "why?". After watching the whole movie, I felt let down at the ending.

Father Koesler (Sutherland) seemed to me to be less than devoted to his calling. Why did he break Catholic rules and baptize a baby born out of wedlock? Whether or not that's a good rule, he is required to abide by it, not pick and choose which he'll obey and which he'll ignore. And why did he break into someone's house? Why would a priest commit a felony?

I'm considering re-watching this film to see if I missed a few things.

I like religious horror and giallos. For example one of my favorite horror films is Alice Sweet Alice, I think The Exorcist is a well-written drama, and I lean towards the Italian films with spiritual or religious imagery. The Rosary Murders deals with a lot of complex issues in the Catholic church, someone might argue the plot of this film is absurd, but it's not. A priest cannot tell on a child rapist or a serial killer even if they confess. One of the reasons I am giving this flick a solid six is because it attempted to confront these kinds of issues head-on, as well as other problems like overly focusing on sexuality in the American conservative churches to the point of insanity, and the mandatory celibacy of priests.

But to see Donald Sutherland in this film a scant fifteen years after the epic supernatural giallo, Don't Look Now, is a little sad. The Rosary Murders would have been so much better handled by a director with a better eye, who actually understood lighting and atmosphere and editing techniques. Instead, this movie looks like it could have been made for tv, and I consider it a stylistic flaw when handling this kind of subject matter. No one wants to watch a movie about religious murders that looks like an episode of Hill Street Blues.