Full Review

The Festival Daily
by John Davies

Is it the End of Days or just the End of the Line?
Fundamentalist fervour and the intensifying culture wars

One of the driving forces in the culture war raging between Conservatives and Liberals south of the border, particularly during George W. Bush’s tenure as president, has been the increasing influence of Christian fundamentalist doctrine on American political discourse and policy initiatives. Though this battle of ideological wills has taken many forms and focused on a range of issues – from stemcell research to foreign policy – the divisive debate regarding the legality and morality of abortion remains one of the culture war’s most explosive fronts. The recent retraction of abortion rights in such U.S. states as South Dakota and Mississippi speaks to the determination and conviction of the Religious Right and the tipping of the judicial scales in their favour.

Determined to give both sides their say and present a no-holds-barred perspective on this immensely complex issue, Tony Kaye’s epic documentary Lake of Fire offers an exhaustive, objective and incendiary investigation into the motives and philosophical reasoning that drive both camps. Shot over fifteen years in stately black and white and containing explicit imagery, insightful examples and heart-rending testimonials, Lake of Fire could well be the defi nitive documentary on the abortion issue.

In addition to interviewing men who have assassinated abortion providers – as well as the survivors of their attacks and a slew of articulate and impassioned academics and advocates embroiled in both sides of the issue – Kaye is brave, audacious and objective enough to include graphic depictions of abortion procedures. These scenes are not for the faint of heart, but they are necessary to the fi lm’s fully informed perspective.

It becomes clear, through the course of the film’s many chillingly candid interviews (including an extended discussion with the woman at the heart of the Roe vs. Wade decision, who has since become a born-again Christian and now works with an anti-abortion group), that the abortion issue itself is merely one battle – albeit an integral one – in a larger war to determine the theological direction of political discourse and policy making in the United States. Hoping to dissolve distinctions between church and state and eventually create “one nation under God,” the Religious Right imagines a future America in which fundamentalist Christian dogma becomes the law of the land, effectively governing all aspects of people’s lived experiences.

This very outcome is the premise for Maurice Devereaux’s gut-wrenching End of the Line, a full-blooded, rip-roaring Canuck horror flick that parodies Christian fundamentalists who are so fixated on saving souls they actually kill people to make it happen.

In the film – set entirely in the cramped tunnels of the Toronto subway system – the massive Voice of Eternal Hope cult receives word on their beepers that the end times have arrived, and now they must do their duty: slaughter as many unbelievers as possible to spare them from Satan’s armies of the apocalypse.

The film delivers sharp stabs of social commentary each time a Christian zealot plunges a crucifi x-dagger into a secular bystander while piously chanting, “God loves you! God loves you!” Devereaux is also smart enough to leave matters murky about whether this is all the fantasy of a cult leader and his followers, or if Judgment Day has indeed arrived.

While End of the Line gleefully embraces a shlock horror aesthetic and keeps its tongue planted fi rmly in cheek, it is nevertheless imbued with a cautionary gravitas that undercuts its genre tone with the threatening sense that this exaggerated reality isn’t so far from today’s experience.

Far from poking fun at fundamentalism, End of the Line refl ects the anxiety felt by those in the leftist corner of the culture wars. Lake of Fire, meanwhile, fittingly ends with its most humane perspective on the issue: that of an average woman undergoing an abortion. When Kaye shows us a reproductive rights activist describing the gruesome ways in which women were (and are) forced to induce miscarriages when abortions and birth control are illegal, the full gravity of this high-stakes culture war is driven home.

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