I remember having seen this, a very long time ago, on Bravo. All I remember is the David Duchovny sex, so I must have come in very early in. This was in those long-ago days when you could find weird independent movies playing there--it's how I first saw The Handmaid's Tale, too. (It could have been a double feature--weird religious movies with sex in them!) This was easily fifteen years ago, and I hadn't seen a frame since. I've read reviews of it here and there--I believe it's another "atoning for Scooby-Doo 2" film, come to that--but I don't think anyone I know has ever actually seen it. I'm not sure even Raul has seen it, unless he happened to catch it on Bravo that one time.

Sharon (Mimi Rogers) leads a wild, hedonistic life alongside Vic (Patrick Bauchau, Sidney from The Pretender). They're clearly intended to be a couple, but they get more joy out of partner-swapping, which is how she meets Randy (David Duchovny). She is an information operator, which has to be one of the world's most boring jobs, and she overhears a few of her coworkers talking about the Pearl and the Boy. She is drawn even further into this when she encounters Angie (Carole Davis), who has an intricate tattoo of the Pearl and so forth on her back. It turns out that it has to do with another sect of born-again Christianity, another one that believes the end of the world is nigh. The difference is that these are all having visions, and the visions seem to indicate that it really is. Because of this, Sharon and Randy are, too, born again, and they get married and (eventually) have Mary (Kimberly Cullum, who also played Abigail and Sammie Jo Fuller on Quantum Leap). And then, Sharon's faith is tested.

It's a running joke that you can date seasons of The X-Files by David Duchovny's hair, and you can do just that here as well. The man actually has a mullet when we first encounter him, and later in the movie, he has Late Eighties Low-Level Bureaucrat hair. (The film's made in 1991, just as The X-Files was about to gear up and during Twin Peaks, but still.) On the other hand, it's about the only really dating thing in the movie. If anything, the movie is more timely now, since that particular stripe of Christianity has had nearly twenty years and a good deal of political control since then. It's eerie, and I think it may well be more eerie now than it was then. Brr!

You take a mood away from this movie. It's haunting. You look at the people involved, and you think, you know, how much does it take to turn me into one of them, if it can do it to Sharon and Randy? And Angie, let us not forget her. You see Sharon go from being a skank who has anonymous sex in skeezy hotel rooms to being the sort of person Ned Flanders would be a little weirded out by. One does not doubt the sincerity of their conversions, but one is a little startled by their speed. Randy suddenly says, "You know, I've always felt I was supposed to be part of something important," and then boom, they're seriously scary religious types. And I mean, I am a religious type, and my mom is, albeit a different religious type, and so forth, so it takes a lot to scare me in that vein. But these people manage it. Then again, they say no one's faith is so strong as that of a convert.

I think, without giving too much of the ending away, that it is God who is found wanting in the end. Sharon does everything she is expected to do, follows every commandment. And yet God cannot take that as the declaration He seems to expect. She must say the words, despite the fact that any God worth worshiping ought to be able to read them in her heart. In the end, Sharon has lost everything that has ever mattered to her, both the secular and the divine. There is nothing left, and she has been brought to that place by God. Though there is also a school that holds that it's all a hallucination brought on by God's failure in one pivotal moment.