© 2004 by John Varley; all rights reserved

 

I do believe Mel Gibson is anti-Semitic, just like his Holocaust-denier old man. But the fact is, in the movie he was only following scripture, which is itself anti-Semitic.

 

If you look into it a little, you will find that a lot of folks monkeyed with this material over the centuries. It’s been translated, edited, added to and subtracted from.

 

In his name, rivers of blood have flowed on every continent except Antarctica, and that’s only because nobody has ever converted penguins to Christianity.

 

Somebody—John says it was Peter; neither Matthew, Mark or Luke name the violent apostle—cut off the ear of "the slave of the high priest"

 

But it doesn’t mention the captors wrapping The Nazz in ropes and then tossing him off the side of a cliff ...  bringing him up short about 20 feet down with a jerk that would have killed anybody but the hero of a violent action movie ... like Mel Gibson.

 

Three Gospels have a poor dude named Simon carrying the cross, they don’t mention The Nazz carrying it at all. John says he carried it himself. Who do you believe? Where do all these elaborations come from?

 

One whip catches skin and flays it open to reveal three bloody ribs. Slow motion, that last refuge of the incompetent director, is employed in awesome amounts, lest you miss one delicious moment of agony.

 

He makes the scourging the centerpiece of his movie, the rotting, pustulent, agonized beating heart of the incredible pile of shit that is The Passion of the Christ.

 

... none of them realize they are being treated to by far the most repugnant, violent, salacious, slavering, sadistic, perverted abomination ever put on film short of an actual snuff movie.

This is my review of The Passion of the Christ. Since my Aramaic is a bit rusty and I don’t speak Hebrew, the following review will be in Latin.

Isthay oviemay ouldshay ebay alledcay "The Assionpay of the Oviegoermay." Evernay avehay I ufferedsay oughthray uchsay a epulsiveray isplayday of omitousvay erversionpay. Elmay Ibsongay has anagedmay to urntay the orystay of the Assionpay into a upidlystay oodyblay ideovay amegay. Omecay, ourgescay the Istchray! Aketay the ipwhay in ouryay andhay! Oundpay in the ailsnay! Atchway the oregay yflay! It’s unfay! Ibsongay ikeslay to etgay the apcray eatenbay out of imselfhay in all ishay oviesmay. Isthay ilmfay is osay oodyblay it akesmay Illkay Illbay ooklay ikelay The Arecay Earsbay Oviemay. If isthay is Istianitychray, ouyay ancay avehay it.

Oh, uckfay this. If this were just an ordinarily vile movie, if it was a cheap piece of crap (as opposed to being an expensive piece of crap, which it is), if it were a violent potboiler on the scale of, say, Van Helsing, I’d leave it here with that one-note joke. But this is THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST!!!!! A GREAT MOVIE!!! (Roger Ebert told me so), a movie that is beloved, revered, even worshipped by millions and millions of seriously sick people. So I’ve got to take it more seriously. To do that, I’ll have to start with a brief history of Christianity:

A long long time ago, when we lived in caves, some people would from time to time suffer a chemical imbalance of the brain, just as some people do today. If they drooled and jabbered and stank and made themselves offensive, we stoned them or burned them, or something equally diverting. (Today we medicate them or put them in padded rooms or grant them their civil right to drool and jabber and stink on the freezing streets.) But every once in a while some people would see visions, or hear the trees and animals talking to them, and tell the story in such a convincing fashion that we listened to them, made them shamen, witch doctors, priests, gave them lots of money, and allowed them to tear the beating hearts from our firstborn sons and/or daughters. (Exactly the way we still do it today.) This comforted us through the long nights when the sabertooth tigers howled. This is the basis of all religion, the rock upon which faiths are founded, including many animistic religions still practiced today.

These holy psychos, possibly in collaboration with outright liars and fantasists (like myself), eventually elaborated these early visions into elaborate systems of stories which we now call mythology, in which animistic beliefs came to be personified in human form. The Norse had their myths, and the Greeks and Romans and Hindus and Irish and many, many others. The Hindus still do. These gods tended to do what human beings do, or would like to do, which is fight a lot and screw a lot and live forever, and seldom do any hard work once the cosmos is created and rolling along on its own, on the back of a giant turtle or what not.

At some point somebody had the idea that maybe there was only one god. I don’t know who it was, and history probably doesn’t record it. Remember, for every nut who babbled and was listened to, a thousand nuts were stoned to death. So there were probably folks before Abraham of the Israelites who put the idea forth. But old Abe’s tall tales lasted longer than anyone else’s, so far as I know. Abe was such a believer he was ready to kill his son because the voices told him to. Today, he might have been Son of Sam. ("Abe say ‘Where you want this killin’ done?’ God said ‘Out on Highway 61!’")

It’s a pretty revolutionary idea, this "One God" business, and it’s never made a lot of sense to me. I mean, which is easier to believe, that the world is so fucked up because a lot of gods have been feuding over it for eternity, or that just one being managed to fuck it up this bad all by himself? No question in my mind.

Abraham’s tribe, the Jews (sometimes called Red Sea pedestrians, among other less flattering terms), have been around, through thick and thin, for a very long time now. For most of that time they’ve been looking for the arrival of a Messiah.

One day a guy in what is now Israel went bugfuck. I’ve debated about what to call him here; he has gone by many names. The most common is Jesus Christ. (So does that make his parents Mary Christ and Joseph Christ?) This J. Christ, esq., was from a podunk town called Nazareth, so people called him the Nazarene.

I’m going to steal a groove from the platter of that great jumpin’ jester of jive, Lord Buckley. I’ll call him The Nazz.)

Up until he was 30 or so The Nazz was normal and ordinary. He liked to work with his hands. I’ll bet hung out with other carpenters, knocking back a few brews after work. I imagine he went to the synagogue most Saturdays, but he could very well have not been too religious at all.

Then The Nazz lost it. He began to have visions, hear voices. He began to preach about it. Then, as now, it wasn’t hard to get a following. He picked up Nazzies like the reverend Moon picks up Moonies. He traveled the countryside, preaching a philosophy that works pretty well for me. Basically, a lot of it boils down to "Don’t hurt each other." I’m behind that. But before long his delusions grew more grandiose. He began to say he was the Messiah. Then he went even farther. He said he was the Son of God himself.

The local religious arbiters got wind of it, and were quite naturally—one might even say understandably and reasonably—pissed off. There’s a long tradition of established religious leaders squashing upstarts who are preaching outside the accepted norms. Blaspheming, in other words. They arrested The Nazz, and decided to kill him.

The area of Judea was under Roman occupation at that time, and only a Roman court could sentence a man to death. But Rule Number One in the Roman occupation manual was "Don’t fuck with the local religion." The Romans had an easy-going religion with the usual zoo of feuding and fucking gods. You didn’t have to tremble before them or worry a lot about incurring their wrath because you were a "sinner." Just make an offering to your favorite one now and then, and you’d be fine. Judaism must have looked like sheer lunacy to them, but hey, who cares who they worship as long as they pay their taxes? This worked well for the Romans for hundreds of years. They had learned that, if you get religious fanatics fighting against you, you can’t win. They will never give up. (One could wish Bush and the neo-cons had understood this simple lesson.)

The local governor, Poncho the Pilot, didn’t want any part of the execution. He handed The Nazz back to the locals and told them to do what they wanted with him, so as to keep the peace. The locals crucified him. The Nazz died. End of story. The last 12 hours in the life of The Nazz is what Mel Gibson set out to portray in TPOTC.

I have to add here a large digression about The Bible. This is a collection of tall tales related to Judaism and Christianity. Here’s a brief outline:

THE OLD TESTAMENT

THE NEW TESTAMENT

The first five books are alleged to have been written by Moses. Of the remainder of the Old Testament, we have no idea who wrote the first half, and the last half were written by more holy nuts, AKA "prophets," whose names are on the books. There are also some poetry collections, which I think is a nice touch.

In the New Testament, the first four books are accounts of the life of The Nazz, known as the Gospels, and most of the rest is letters about organizing and proselytizing and points of faith, sort of 1st Century interoffice memos, most of them written by Paul and John. (My favorite is 2 John, a chatty little 13 paragraphs that can be summed up as "Hi, Cyria babe, I saw your kids and they’re okay. Keep the faith, watch out for false leaders. I’ve got lots more to say but I won’t write it here, so ... see ya soon!" This merits inclusion in THE Book? Personally, I think that ol’ dog Johnny was getting a little on the side.)

Obviously, the most important parts of the Bible from a Christian perspective are the four Gospels, and none of them were written until at least 30 years after The Nazz was crucified, and only two were written by guys who were there! (I’m not sure if Luke ever even met The Nazz.) None of them tell exactly the same story, and John’s account was written in about 95 AD, when he was an old, old man without much lead in his pencil. At about the same time he wrote Revelations, and you gotta wonder what he was smokin’ when he dreamed all that up! A classic madman if there ever was one.

What I’m saying here, this stuff is not exactly what you’d call reliable. If you look into it a little, you will find that a lot of folks monkeyed with this material over the centuries. It’s been translated, edited, added to and subtracted from. Catholics have books in their Bible that Protestants don’t. A lot of old manuscripts a lot more interesting than 2 John didn’t make the cut.

And take a look at the OT. From about the 10^th century BC to the 5^th, Judea was lousy with prophets writing down their crazy visions and signing their names. You couldn’t take a leak in Judea without pissing on a prophet. Suddenly, there’s a 450-year gap, until The Nazz begins his ministry. Does this smell right to you? Oh, sure, it was a long time ago, you have to accept that many records were lost. There are plenty of excuses you can find for the gap: Those goldarn Philistines looted the library! The courthouse burned down! The dog ate my homework! But it stinks to me. My guess: during those 450 years there was a real herd of crazy men claiming to be the Messiah. Most of them were stoned, or burnt, or crucified, as usual, and then their stories were suppressed as unnecessary competition when the Church with a capital C began assembling what would later be called The Bible. And consider that the 12 disciples ... well, 11, once they hanged the squealer and divvied up his 30 pieces of silver (you didn’t buy that suicide story, did you? ... and, hey, you can’t found a church without seed money), had at least thirty years to get their stories straight. I mean, where’s the Gospel According to Saint Simon, or Saint Philip, or Saint Bartholomew? I think the Big Eleven decided on a basic story and stuck to it all those years.

In fact, the real credit for the state of Christianity over the last two millennia and right up to today goes to the disciples, not to The Nazz himself. When you look at what he said, what he taught, it’s inspiring and sweet and rather unexpected in the political and social context of the time. I’m sure the Judean flower people flocked to him. He was probably charismatic as hell, like David Koresh or Jim Jones. (Koresh seems to have had a photographic memory for Scripture; maybe The Nazz was like that, too. Maybe the story of him confounding the elders in the temple when just a lad was true, and not made up later, like that virgin birth/star in the west/three wise men nonsense.) But you don’t see flocks of people praising the name of Jim Jones today, calling out for people to "Take up your Kool-Aid and follow me!" That’s because all his senior staff were as bugfuck as he was, and snuffed themselves.

Not the Big Eleven. Those cats burrowed into Roman society, laid low, did that catacomb thing when they weren’t starring as lion food in the Coliseum. Then they got a break. One of the Roman Emperors went bugfuck, too, and endorsed Christianity as the official religion of the Empire, and the Church was off to the races. With the help of some hungry animist barbarians, the Church swallowed the Empire and ushered in an era when the Church was more than just the Big Thing ... it was Everything. In Europe, all search for new scientific and philosophical ideas was halted; everything had to be approved by the Church. The Church had its own generals, its own armies, its own enforcers of all kinds. This glorious period when the Church ruled every thought and deed, pretty much like a lot of people would like to have it today, lasted for a thousand years, and today we call it ... The Dark Ages.

You can’t blame The Nazz for the Dark Ages. In fact, the list of things you can’t blame The Nazz for is very, very long. In his name, rivers of blood have flowed on every continent except Antarctica, and that’s only because nobody has ever converted penguins to Christianity. If The Nazz were to return (a resurrection I do not look for), I think he would be more than a little bemused to learn that he had walked on water, raised a dead man, fed a multitude with a few fish sticks and a couple hoagie buns.

To me, it seems so clear how all that "miracle" business got started. Picture a hot Mediterranean day in some awful little 1st Century town like Ephesus or Philippi or Thessalonia. Peter is standing on a soapbox like any street preacher today at the streetcar turnaround on Market Street in San Francisco. The sermon isn’t going well:

And I am sure The Nazz would be more than horrified to learn of the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Reformation, the depredations of missionaries, the long persecution of the Jews. I think he’d be appalled by the whole massive structure of the Catholic Church itself, elaborated over the centuries into a bureaucracy and an iron fist that would have made Pilate or Herod turn pale, and by the countless schisms from Byzantium to Islam to Lutheranism to Episcopals and Methodists and Christian Scientists and Mormons. I think that, if The Nazz did come back, he’d log on to the Internet and do a bit of research, and within a week he’d be hiding out in Amish country, turning out knock-offs of Shaker furniture and keeping his head down.

I went through all that to let you know that, in the following critique of The Passion of the Christ—and I will get to it, trust me!—when I say something like "The Nazz entered into Jerusalem on the back of his ass," I mean "That’s what one or more of the Apostles reported in the Bible." There are those who believe that every word of the Bible is the literal Truth. I don’t know how they manage this, since some parts of the Bible clearly contradict other parts, but there it is. I am almost completely in the other direction. Yes, I know certain things can be checked and could be believed—the time of the reign of some petty potentate in some pisspot principality, some geographical facts, things known to have happened in the Roman Empire, maybe some genealogy here and there—but other than that, I don’t believe anything in the Bible is true. I don’t believe all of its historical assertions, and I don’t believe any of its spook stories. It is largely a collection of fables, particularly the Gospels, directly descended from the ravings of madmen who had just figured out how to kill animals with stone tools.

So I am taking the accounts of The Nazz’s passion in the Gospels as "true" only as the basis of this review. You will notice that, from the opening scene in the Garden of Gethsemane (where somebody—John says it was Peter; neither Matthew, Mark or Luke name the violent apostle—cut off the ear of "the slave of the high priest"—who only John identifies as Malchus ... who Luke claims The Nazz then healed, something the other three neglect to report), to The Nazz’s exit line (loosely translated from the Aramaic: "I’m outta here!"), nothing supernatural happens. After that there’s a big wind and an earthquake; I take no position on that. And the last scene of The Passion is The Nazz getting up three days later, which I reject. But the rest of it ... how does it work as a telling of the "events," how does it stack up as a work of art, how does it work as a movie, and finally, what does it say about Mel Gibson and Christianity?

The movie begins in the Garden, with spooky, haunted house music and The Nazz already covered in sweat as he prays. He and his sleeping apostles are approached, betrayed by Judas, and there is a really violent fight. The Nazz is brutalized. He is struck violently about the face and body, and bound in ropes.

Leaving out the ear-severing stuff, Matthew describes the scene like this:

Mark says this:

Luke:

And John:

Check me here, but none of that sounds all that violent. Sure, with such sketchy material you’ve got to ratchet it up some if you want to make a dramatic story. And the crowd had swords and clubs, so you can infer that they might have used them. But it doesn’t say so. John gives the most violent account. They "seized and bound him." Anybody who’s seen the Rodney King video knows what an ordeal that can be. Matthew says they "laid hands on him." That can be nasty, too. But it doesn’t mention the captors wrapping The Nazz in ropes and then tossing him off the side of a cliff or a wall (it was too dark for me to tell for sure), bringing him up short about 20 feet down with a jerk that would have killed anybody but the hero of a violent action movie ... like Mel Gibson, for instance. I’m not kidding; that scene is in there. So by the time he’s brought before the Sanhedrin The Nazz is already a bloody, staggering mess.

And it’s only going to get worse, trust me.

Then The Nazz is tossed back and forth between the Jewish elders, Pontius Pilate, and King Herod. Pilate doesn’t want him. The Jews want to crucify him. PP agrees to have him "chastised," I think is the word he used.

Here’s Matthew on what happened next:

Mark:

Luke:

And John:

And right there, I have quoted all the descriptions of violence done to The Nazz as described in the Bible, except for the crucifixion itself, which is equally sketchy.

All of the above is very nasty, no question about it. To scourge is to flog or whip. In the British Navy in the 1800s 50 lashes could sometimes kill a man. To be "flogged round the fleet" was a virtual death sentence. So, though the Bible doesn’t have much to say about the details, it is justifiable to show The Nazz getting a pretty hard time of it: scourged, punched, spat upon, crowned with thorns, and hit upside the head with a "reed," whatever that means. Maybe something like a pool cue. Expect him to be battered and bloody when he is "led" to Golgotha for the main event, that jolly ceremony known as crucifixion. (Three Gospels have a poor dude named Simon carrying the cross, they don’t mention The Nazz carrying it at all. John says he carried it himself. Who do you believe? Where do all these elaborations come from?) Anyway, a filmmaker can easily justify showing The Nazz getting brutally whipped for a few minutes, right?

Okay, I didn’t time it, but I’d guess that Gibson spent at least 30 minutes on the scourging ... and it seemed much longer. I really can’t recall a gore-fest in the history of cinema that was filmed so lovingly, so lingeringly, with such pornographic attention to detail, except for a few scenes where Mel Gibson gets the shit kicked out of himself in one of his movies. (Mel likes getting the shit kicked out of him, at least in the movies. It’s in his contract: "In the next-to-last reel, Mr. Gibson will get the living shit kicked out of him." If Mel re-made Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory there would be a scene where evil children kicked the shit out of him and almost drowned him in liquid fudge.) The Romans wielding the whips stop now and then to change "scourges," in a scene that can’t help but remind you of Bruce Willis in the pawn shop in Pulp Fiction, choosing and then rejecting one horrible weapon after another until he settles on the samurai sword. At one point two of them have to stop, breathing as hard as if they’d just run a marathon, worn out from a heavy day of scourging. I was afraid one of them might have a heart attack. The blood and gobbets of flesh fly right into our eyes, and spatter the torturers. One whip catches skin and flays it open to reveal three bloody ribs. Slow motion, that last refuge of the incompetent director, is employed in awesome amounts, lest you miss one delicious moment of agony.

At this point, if you hadn’t already realized it from the gratuitous tidbit of dropping The Nazz off the cliff, you come to understand that you are in the hands of a very, very sick man, and his name is Mel Gibson. He makes the scourging the centerpiece of his movie, the rotting, pustulent, agonized beating heart of the incredible pile of shit that is The Passion of the Christ. The actual crucifixion, with all the salivating attention paid to the nails going in, the nails coming out the back, the blood dripping from the nails, seems almost an anti-climax.

So what do I care?

I don’t, really. Gibson can believe whatever shit he wants to believe. I understand he is a member of a small, radical sect of Catholics who reject Vatican II and want the mass to be celebrated in Latin, among other things. I got no problem with that. Hell, if I was Catholic, I think I’d prefer the Latin, too, I can sleep better through Latin. My main philosophy concerning religion is a lot like the Romans. So long as you don’t shove it in my face or try to run my government with it, you can believe anything you want to believe.

What I care about, something that I knew before but which TPOTC brought home with new and vivid power is that pain, agony, torture, suffering, blood and gore are not only the putrid heart of this movie, not only the maggot-ridden meat of the sick soul of Mel Gibson, but the festering and never-healing pus infecting the body of Christianity itself.

... Okay, God didn’t strike me dead. How about that?

I don’t blame The Nazz. It’s the Big 11, and 2000 years of confabulation by the organized Church, hundreds of Popes, even the so-called "Reformers," like Luther. It’s this crucifixion fetish that contaminates what might have been (and sometimes is, I admit) a humane and worthwhile philosophy of life. It is this image of the bloody, scourged, and nailed-up Christ (the Gospels don’t mention nails, none of them, but we know it was a common practice) that has led to so much monstrosity in the name of The Nazz. Suffering is good for you. Agony is a moral plus. Every Easter it leads men to have themselves nailed to crosses. It is behind those crazy dudes who wear barbed-wire Fruit-of-the-looms or, if you’ve read that incredible piece of crap The Da Vinci Code (and who hasn’t?), the cilice. It is behind the concept of self-mortification, everything from relative peccadilloes like sleeping on the floor and fasting to crawling a hundred miles on your knees to some shrine, flogging yourself all the way.

So what I’ve had the most trouble with, as I watched scenes of scourging and crucifixion portrayed in such loving detail, scenes that would gag the proverbial maggot and make Ted Bundy vomit, is picturing the audiences in theaters, in a frenzied passion of orgasmic sympathy. He did this for me! He suffered, oh, how He suffered! And all for my sins! These are people who would scream like factory whistles at a naked nipple, who deplore the "gratuitous violence" rampant in film today, and none of them realize they are being treated to by far the most repugnant, violent, salacious, slavering, sadistic, perverted abomination ever put on film short of an actual snuff movie.

Okay, some Christians came out saying they thought it was maybe a trifle overboard. But the sales figures and the sermons preached from 10,000 pulpits prove that most viewers loved it, bought it on DVD, and will watch it again and again. It is hard for me to believe, but I must believe, that at the heart of the belief system of one billion people is this unholy psychopathology.

But then, the beliefs of one billion Muslims are just as disgusting in a different way, and as for the one billion Hindus ... what can you do but laugh? Until you hear of Hindus slaughtering Muslims by the thousands and realize their stupid religion really isn’t funny after all.

I can’t end this review without mentioning anti-Semitism. Some accused the movie of being anti-Semitic, and I’m sorry to say that I can’t agree. (I’d like to heap every calumny possible on Gibson’s thorn-crowned head.) I have to qualify that, though. I do believe Mel Gibson is anti-Semitic, just like his Holocaust-denier old man. But the fact is, in the movie he was only following scripture, which is itself anti-Semitic. Ugly, but true. For the last time here, I will quote chapter and verse:

Matthew 27

Can’t get much clearer than that, can you? Matthew goes on to say:

As far as I can tell, that one verse is the justification for two millennia of Jewish persecution. It is at the very heart of the Passion, and the heart of the New Testament. It was the Jews who killed The Nazz. No question about it ... if you believe in the Bible.

And the way I see it, they got a bum rap. For one thing, I think The Nazz was guilty as charged. Blasphemy, sedition, inciting to riot, call it what you want. He was threatening the structure of the established religion of the day, and he had to be dealt with. Penalties of the day were apt to be severe. They might have stoned him, and we might never have heard of him again. The guy was asking for it, he was provoking them! Read the trial transcripts. He said things that had to be dealt with by death, and to other questions he deliberately pissed them off by remaining silent. Okay, he was insane, but that wasn’t a defense back then, it was a crime, possession by demons or something like that. What was wrong with the trial? It wasn’t fair? He wasn’t properly mirandized, he didn’t have good legal representation? It looked entirely fitting and proper to me, by the standards of the day. If I was a prosecutor, I’d have taken it to court.

The central fact is, he wanted to be killed. It was all in fulfillment of prophecy, it says so right there in the book. Oh, sure, the story says he didn’t want to die, not at first, he whined to his Daddy: "Dad, this is a big bummer. All things considered, I’d rather be fishing." And Daddy said "You thought this was going to be a picnic?" So The Nazz agreed to the deal, which wasn’t a bad one. Twelve hours of agony, and then an eternity of being the Number Two Boy. I’d have taken it, if I believed in eternity.

So what we have here, the Jews were instruments of God’s Will. God wanted his boy nailed up, for reasons I’ve never been able to fathom, but the Word is he moves in mysterious ways. Just look around you if you don’t believe that. The way I read it, the Jews had no more choice in the matter than The Nazz did. What if the Sanhedrin had said "Hey, we like the licks this cat is layin’ down. Let him go!" And there’s The Nazz, in deep doo-doo with the old man. A guy you don’t want to cross!

Therefore ... Christians can certainly justify their hatred of Jews ... if they are unforgiving Christians, which The Nazz counseled them not to be. A Christian can look at the Jews today and say "Dirty Christ-killers!" or he can say "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Sound familiar? Does a merciful Christian hold a grudge for 2000 years? Well, of course, a lot do. Nice guys like Adolph Hitler and Hutton Gibson and probably his little boy Mel Columcille Gerard.

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A semi-final thought. If there is a Rule Number One in Hollywood today, it is this: If a picture makes Big Bux, there will be a sequel. TPOTC currently stands as the #9 movie of all time in the US, #24 internationally, with earnings of $604,000,000. ($100,000,000 goes directly to the Catholic Church, according to Gibson. They can sure use it, to pay judgements against pedophile priests. Whew! For a while there I thought they might go broke!) You can certainly count on more big religious movies, now that it’s been proven there is a market for them again, just like a lot of big musicals are coming down the pike since Chicago was a big hit.

But TPOTC seems to me to present a few problems in the sequel department. Let’s face it, The Passion of the Christ: The Return of the Son just won’t have the visceral, that is to say ultra-violent, appeal of the original. What happens? He appears here and there, shows his wounds, preaches a little, and sends his Big 11 out into the world to convert humanity to The Word. Where’s the blood and gore in that? Where’s the video game? Prequels have the same problem. We’ve got the stories of the virgin birth ... but that eliminates even the sex element, the only other way to sell a blockbuster movie if you’ve got no violence. (Was it God or the Holy Ghost who supposedly got it on with Mary? Could you show that? And still keep an R-rating?) After that, there’s no record of what The Nazz did until he went crazy. Sure, you could have him leading a strike of the Carpenters Union, Judean Local 12, with Roman and Jewish cops bashing The Nazz over the head, throwing him over cliffs, pissing on him, and top it off with an exciting chase on donkey-back through the teeming streets of Nazareth. Maybe have Mary kidnapped and held hostage until The Nazz bursts in and kicks ass ... hey, scripture doesn’t say it didn’t happen. And what we do know of his life pre-crucifixion is non-violent preaching and cheap magic tricks. Siegfried and Roy put on a better show until that tiger deal.

My suggestion is to follow the subsequent careers of the Big 11. Didn’t some of them get crucified, too? I seem to recall that one was shot full of arrows, and another was nailed to a cross upside-down. That has to hurt. Think about it, Mel. I’m available for screenplay work.

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When I was done watching TPOTC—and I promise you, it seemed a lot longer than the twelve hours it covers, or the two hours actual running time—I had quite a bad taste in my mouth. Probably from swallowing all that vinegar, myrrh, gall, and hyssop, the various things said in the Gospels to have been fed to The Nazz on the cross. I was badly in need of an antidote to all that poison.

I rented Monty Python's Life of Brian. If, after toiling your way through this review, you feel the need to carry your own cinematic cross to your own Hollywood Golgotha (that is to say, you decide to watch the movie), I recommend you watch Life of Brian afterward, too. Nothing will entirely purge the rottenness of this abomination from your mind, but a good laugh never hurts.

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