MOVIE REVIEW : FATHER, SON VERSUS EVIL CULT IN ‘THE BELIEVERS’

Good as much of John Schlesinger’s “The Believers” (citywide) is--and it’s one of the better-produced, more exciting and intelligent thrillers of the year--it’s hard to keep from wondering, as you watch, why he wanted to do it in the first place. What made the director of “Midnight Cowboy,” “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” and “An Englishman Abroad” settle on this oft-told shockfest, this demonic thriller about a distraught father, an innocent son and the menacing black magical forces gathering around them?

Was it the exotic mixed milieu: from Manhattan’s elite, to the meaner streets of Spanish Harlem? Was it some parable of corrupted religion he saw dimly filtering through the portrayal of Santeria-- a religion in which African rituals are disguised under Catholic customs and saints?

Was he eager to evoke an American underside--or demonstrate organized evil infiltrating society’s upper strata? Was he drawn, more modestly, to the emotions of a single father struggling to save his son from scads of devils, murderers, financiers and eye-rolling cultists hellbent on slaughter?

None of these motives seems truly realized or satisfying. Nor does Schlesinger’s own avowal, in the studio press book, that he found it “a moving story about people pushed to the edge of their reality,” with “strong visual elements.”

Strong visual elements it definitely has. The movie was photographed by Robby Muller; his best shots have a molten intensity. Schlesinger and Muller are expert at catching the look of a city and there are few scenes here that don’t have something interesting to watch: a store filled with cult items, caught in lazy, dust-filled light, for example; or the trendy casualness of the psychotherapist’s apartment; the chaos of a suicidal cop’s neglected room; the way the sun hits the counter in a cheap Latino drugstore; an abandoned movie house filled with guttering candles, smears of blood, globs of shadow.

But it’s difficult to see any edge to the reality; the movie plunges off its own edge way too early. Based on Nicholas Conde’s “The Religion,” it revolves around an attempt by a bevy of maniacs, who indulge in ritual sacrifice, to latch onto the only son of widower Cal Jamison (Martin Sheen). These fiends are unnervingly well equipped. They can drive people to suicide by remote control, unleash horrendous insect and snake invasions, mentally and physically enslave their victims--besides being able to perform amazing feats of ventriloquism and fog the minds of their foes as thoroughly as The Shadow. So impregnable is their evil, so limitless the talents of their magnetic leader, Palo (Malick Bowens), that any victory over them seems impossible.

In all of this, there’s such a disjunction between the densely detailed social backgrounds and the phantasms of the plot that Schlesinger can shock us only by going to extremes--which he often does. There’s one screamer of a sequence, with erupting insects, that seems to have been inspired by “Un Chien Andalou.” There are butchered children, two operatic suicides, lots of blood and feverish satanic rites in a movie house and an abandoned factory. But these scenes affect you more visually than viscerally; the drama is too scattered for the movie to achieve any concentrated power.

Schlesinger and scenarist Mark Frost (“Hill Street Blues”) make a few stabs at investigating the dark and light strains of Santeria. But no serious religious portrait could survive the hellish cloud-cuckoo-land into which this movie’s formulas drive it.

Cal Jamison--through no fault of Sheen’s--isn’t a deeply engaging protagonist. As written, he’s too passive, too gullible, too easily fooled to be a believable match for evil. His parenting problems, initially interesting, are afterward slighted--though there might have been a more horrific effect if we had felt the satanic threats to his son Chris (Harley Cross) as symbolic of strains and angers in the family, with Cal’s parental guilt mushrooming out of control.

The cast, especially Sheen, Cross, Lee Richardson, Richard Masur and Carla Pinza, are all fine. But the movie’s most interesting characters, and best performances, are the divided, tormented cops, played by Robert Loggia and Jimmy Smits. At first, Loggia’s Sean McTaggert may seem a simple reprise of “Jagged Edge,” but he builds to a surprisingly harrowing climax of sweat and pain. Smits, as the possessed Tom Lopez, is introduced on too high a pitch--a screaming tantrum that seems to leave him nowhere to go--but his last scene of pain is also remarkable: a controlled descent into light-of-day fear and wild, stomach-rending agony. If “The Believers” (MPAA-rated R for considerable bloodshed) revolved around this pair rather than Jamison, or if Jamison had comparable aria shots at misery and disintegration, its impact would multiply.

Even more, if Schlesinger had tossed out all the supernatural elements and focused on a simpler story of family strife against the same magic-laden backdrop, he might have had a better movie. His talents, for intimate psychology and social detail, aren’t suited to this kind of bloody extravaganza, any more than John Huston’s were to “Phobia.” Sometimes the market and its expectations demand too heavy a price.

‘THE BELIEVERS’ An Orion Pictures release. Producers John Schlesinger, Michael Childers, Beverly Camhe. Director John Schlesinger. Script Mark Frost. Executive producer Edward Teets. Camera Robby Muller. Editor Peter Honess. Music J. Peter Robinson. With Martin Sheen, Helen Shaver, Harley Cross, Robert Loggia, Elizabeth Wilson, Harris Yulin, Lee Richardson.

Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).