Some movies leave you speechless. Sometimes this happens because a movie it so good that you feel that your words would taint the feeling the film has left you with. At much more rare times you are simply left speechless because you’re not exactly sure what you just watched. The Catechism Cataclysm is the latter. I am honestly still processing what this movie means or if it means anything at all and I will be for some time.
The movie opens with a Priest names Father Billy (played by Steve Little). Billy is a bad priest. I don’t mean bad as in evil, I mean bad as in incompetent. He tells his bible studies group wacky stories he heard on the internet rather than actually discussing the bible, he uses the church computers to watch Youtube and he generally doesn’t seem to actually be into this whole “God” thing. To get rid of Billy, the head of his parish suggests he go on a vacation. Billy contacts a man named Robbie Shoemaker (played by Robert Longstreet) who used to date his sister. When Billy was a teenager he idolized Robbie and hopes to go on a canoe trip with him. Robbie seems to be barely able to stand Billy but agrees to go on the canoe trip anyways. They go down the river and they talk, they get lost and then things get weird in ways I won’t spoil here.
The Catechism Cataclysm is a comedy at it’s heart but I didn’t really find it to be all that funny. I was amused by plenty of it but very little of it actually made my laugh out loud. I will admit that this movie just isn’t really my type of sense of humor. Most of the comedy comes from just how irritating Billy is and how Robbie reacts to him. The problem is that I ended up just being irritated by Billy far more than I was amused. There are also some moments that just kind of fall flat. Early on Billy and Robbie are at a diner and Billy orders far too much crappy diner food, and that’s it. That’s the joke, or at least I think that was supposed to be a joke. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to laugh and it was just a pointless little moment. I just don’t know. There’s also some toilet humor in there but it’s so brief that I can just let that slide. Still, and this might sound kind of bad, but, in the end the comedy not entirely working for me might have helped me like the movie more. When the movie gets surreal and strange, the tonal shift wasn’t as bad as it might have been.
Still, despite the broad comedy, it’s two leads are quite believable. Billy might be irritating but I believed that he seemed real enough. While he can be pretty over the top sometimes, he’s never a caricature. The movie pretty well establishes why he is the way he is. The writing for Robbie somehow makes sense as to why he’d go on a canoe trip with someone he clearly can’t stand. In many films getting the two in canoe would be a convoluted affair but here I never questioned it. In general Robbie is well written as what is essentially the straight man of the picture and he too has some depth to him. The actors themselves also help a great deal in selling the characters and the movie as a whole.
I’m still not sure what they were selling though. This movie has so many things going on in it’s plot that I’m not quite sure where to start in regards to what it all means, but maybe that’s the point. There are some things that are clear to me. Billy’s relationship with Robbie is basically his relationship with God. Robbie essentially influenced every part of who Billy currently is. There is clear meaning in how little Robbie is actually aware of this fact and how little he actually even cares about Billy. There are all these things that Billy believes about Robbie that just aren’t true. Some have some truth to them and some are complete misunderstandings on Billy’s part. The idea of a movie like this is that the wayward priest would find out the truth to his relationship to God, and on the river everything is set up for Billy to learn some sort of truth. However, Part of the thing that confounds me about this film is I’m not sure what Billy actually learns. The trip changes him but not in a way that actually makes sense. There is so much here that I feel like there’s something I must be missing. The films direction doesn’t help. It’s not bad or anything but it’s just kind of there. Even when the movie gets weird, the director doesn’t really pull any tricks. The music is predominantly metal (with a notable exception towards the end) but I’m not even sure if that choice has meaning beyond the fact that Billy likes Metal. There is satanic imagery everywhere (including on Robbie’s shirt) but I’m not sure how or to what capacity Satan comes in here. While this movie suggests an almost uncaring God, other parts make it clear that God will fuck you up. There is a God present in this film but where he is remains a mystery.
However this all might be the point. There are two places in the film where Robbie tells a story. Both stories end abruptly leaving their audiences aggravated. After one Billy suggests that the story have a happy ending involving an amazing boner. Robbie replies, “This isn’t an amazing boner story”. Looking for God is not going to yield a clear and amusing little ending. That is not the way it works. While some other-worldly stuff happens here, none of it answers a thing and really every bizarre event raises even more questions. The last shot alone raises so many questions that I wouldn’t even know where to begin. This is the very nature of looking for answers about God and maybe that’s what the film is trying to say. Or maybe it’s just a strange little comedy that goes off the rails at one point. I don’t know. I will never know. Just like at the end of the film Billy still is struggling to understand Robbie’s story, after the film I still am not sure what just happened. There’s even scene that indicates that this might have been the intended response.
So, do I recommend this movie? I guess so. It’s strange enough that I think it’s worth a shot. You might see it and think I’m just crazy. Maybe it will all click together for you better then it did for me. Either way, for better or worse, you’ll remember it.
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