The Da Vinci Virus (2005)

 

a.k.a. Cup of My Blood

Director: Lance Catania

Screenplay: Lance Catania and Kenneth Nilsson

Cast: Daniel Patrick Sullivan as Jack Fender; Janina Gavankar as Iona; Allie Smith as Tina; Roger Anderson as Sparky; Lance Mulvaney as Alex; Circus-Szalewski as Nibbles; John Turk as Memoli

Ephemeral Waves

 

The Da Vinci Virus is a film you the reader may have never heard of before. In reality, its real title is Cup of My Blood, a low budget religious suspense film with horror tropes, but I came to this when it was under an entirely different title to ride the coattails of another bigger film, something its director/co-writer Lance Catania probably did not know about for its British release. This is a tradition that has managed to last even into the streaming era, for better and for worse, in that in the past, of taking grindhouse/drive-in films and selling them under new names on the back of big Hollywood films, something which also found its way into the 2000s DVD era here, clearly distributed under a different name for British supermarket sells on DVD to sell off the back of The Da Vinci Code, the 2006 film adaptation of the big Dan Brown novel. With hindsight, there is remotely no connection to Brown's success, controversial and divisive 2003 novel at all, making the act of having read The Da Vinci Code and rewatching the 2006 adaptation starring Tom Hanks pointless. The context is important as, whilst an unofficial "mockbuster" title, this is the context of how I came to this film, and how it once came to be among the "worst I had ever seen", so it is worth establishing my history before returning to this.

For those who do not know, Brown's fiction novel became a huge seller but a controversial one, about a symbologist named Robert Langdon who finds himself in a conspiracy about the truth of Jesus Christ's legacy. It was accused for being blasphemous; it was challenged for the theories it was based on in premise; it was sued for "borrowing" said theories from the non-fiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982); and was challenged as being badly written. It however became a cultural zeitgeist that helped put Dan Brown on the map, and the decision to rename Cup of My Blood into the title I came to it as, when my parents bought it, was likely in mind to the hype behind the 2006 film, directed by Ron Howard and with Tom Hanks playing Langdon. Reading the book, it is fun if you take a pinch of salt every time Brown brings in facts of history and art, pulpy hokum in its page and adapted form. Truthfully, none of it connects at all to Virus, baring the likelihood to albino henchman briefly seen is connected to one from the book tentatively. Whether you think of the Da Vinci Code - love it, loath it, think it is the work of Satan - it does deserve to be canon in pop culture, and I have no shame in enjoying the thing with no expectations, as this pop culture phenomenon that blew up in my adolescence, never reading the tome until for this review, has the pace and tone of naive eyed silliness to it I could appreciate. With mind this segment was meant to be a prologue to the film I covered, only for them to be entirely foreign to each other in premise and tone, The Da Vinci Virus is a film which could have been something interesting as a low budget oddity, and is instead a curious schism of ideas of its own which awkwardly mismatch.

There is, before anyone asks, no references to Leonardo Da Vinci whatsoever in this film, the Italian polymath a huge part to the Da Vinci Code's premise, and the only connection to religion in its apocalyptic premise, which touches on a Book of Revelations style scenario, is the Holy Grail, the cup Christ drank at the Last Supper before his crucifixion. It is turned into a MacGuffin here in a curious mix of the profane, religious iconography, discussion about photography clearly of interest to Lance Catania, who beyond this film is primarily a cinematographer, and what he likely brought to the script on a personal level, cheesy horror tropes and a surprising level of sexual explicitness, with a pronounced level of green hue to everything in the DVD version we got in supermarkets.

The Grail is there to heed the apocalypse; with a touch of the Ark of the Covenant from the Indiana Jones films there is the issue when handling this sacred object as, if the person not chosen to protect it opens the box it is housed in, everyone who does is turned into a (CGI assisted) skeletal husk by the spectres of former protectors. The one chosen to protect this box is Jack (Daniel Patrick Sullivan), a former art gallery/art book photographer who has fallen into being the photographer for a porn website "2nd Cumming", which will later be revealed to be a (not so) secret cover for a religious conspiracy group. This was the aspect I remembered as the most idiosyncratic and likely to still be the most memorable thing of all this film, as that does raise an eyebrow as an idiosyncratic plot choice alongside naming a side character of importance "Nibbles". Jack's career choice, even if he will argue about the virtues of photo film over digital, is trauma over the murder of his girlfriend Tina, who died three years prior to the start of the film and is clearly a more suspect event from the get-go to its cause. Neither helping is that ghosts who have clearly been inspired by the 2000s boom in J-horror, terrified by images of black eyed spooky children and grey undead figures, are haunting him.

The religious may not appreciate the premise, including the mix of sexuality into this, although I should be frank in saying that this is not really a religious film with its apocalypse threat and talk of a chosen, more a secular pulp plot tone that could have changed the Christian iconography to high fantasy tropes and not changed much in the plot, which is one of the huge issues with this. When the double-double crosses and abrupt crucifixions with guts disembowelled out the body transpiring, it would have been appreciated if this had really taken the esoteric route further in referencing real dogma, even if in a profane direction, to make the plot more than the boiler plate one it does become. When it is proclaiming that the Second Coming will actually be by way of binary code, you see what a weird and interesting film this could have been, even as a low budget pulp one, but it feels instead a film which "could have" been this. This feels lost in all the plot it wants to get into, the reason likely I hated this back in the day alongside my dismissive attitude to low budget cinema, when the low budget cinema aesthetic and the clear idiosyncrasies, the sexuality and the obsession with photography, are the more compelling touches. Honestly its interest in sexuality is the one aspect to the film which could have sold it for luridness but actually becomes the most compelling aspect, especially as this is riffing on eroticism as found in photography art books, something distinct as a subject to touch on. Contrasting the porn site's blatantness with the erotic art of Jack, which does evoke real art book productions, even when being blasphemous with the melding of sensuality with Christian iconography you see that, in another world, Lance Catania and Kenneth Nilsson with the script could have jettisoned the apocalypse plot as this is clearly more interesting to the pair of them. Horror plot themes could have still been in this, of the figure named Iona (Janina Gavankar) who inspires Jack romantically and creatively, with the horror being that she is not who she may seem as the ideal. Even the starkness of the porn shots, actresses bluntly asking which dildo to use, as a nice contrast, whilst keeping the philosophical porn producer with shady criminal edges to him, is a more compelling idea than the conspiracy plot is wrapped within.

The plot itself is ambitious and convoluted, but also with the sense, even if you only had access to some locations including an indoor swimming pool, it feels far less interesting than being in this world of a photographer trying to find himself. In general, whatever budget, I find that the plot structures are less inteteresting than the tropes meant to sell a film, and here you have such a vague religious end of the world scenario, as you might find in a big Hollywood film, that is not interest, which means the Holy Grail or the ghosts to loomed around are of far less interest than the quirks. The gore that is split, some lower budget CGI and some fake guts, feels with a sense that if this had let its hair done and been more indulgent, embracing the absurd tone with its green hued corridors and apartments feeling like liminal spaces, I might have been able to appreciate this more. [Huge Spoiler] When it even pulls the twist Jack killed his own girlfriend by accident, but hid the body and had traumatising amnesia, it cements the curse this decided to put upon itself with trying to follow what is expected as compelling genre thriller tropes than just being indulgent. [Spoilers End]

The irony is that, whilst with little connection to each other, The Da Vinci Code managed to be compelling because for all the controversies about it showing real theories of the true nature of Christ, it was far more interesting as the adventures of the least conventional hero and his quirks, Robert Langdon, in a very over-the-top adventure where the clues and suspense where in the least conventional ways possible, by looking at all paintings and trying to find clues. All pretensions of its real theories was lost to pure old school storytelling when, whether tasteful or not, a Catholic albino monk assassin was brought in, and even Dan Brown's shoehorned attempts at profoundness in the cultural references in the novel had an eccentric charm. With hindsight, it became for me that weird and eccentric work which inexplicably caught fire, rather than stay an obscure work as an idiosyncratic author, and become a megahit. The Da Vinci Virus as I learnt of it as is as brazen in its own way, which I have to admire, part of an era of straight-to-DVD pulp cinema that will eventually get interest for how it led to curiosities like this, but with this one unfortunately a title which took too many clichés from bigger films than ride its own idiosyncrasies.