| The Eighteenth Angel | |
| Director: | William Bindley |
| Producer: | Douglas Curtis William Hart |
| Cinematography: | Thomas E. Ackerman |
| Editing: | William Hoy |
| Music: | Jeff Eden Fair Starr Parodi |
| Distributor: | Rysher Entertainment |
| Released: | (Japan) (USA) |
| Runtime: | 95 minutes |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
The Eighteenth Angel is a 1997 American horror-thriller film, starring Christopher McDonald, Rachael Leigh Cook, Stanley Tucci, Wendy Crewson, and Maximilian Schell. It was directed by William Bindley and written by David Seltzer.
An ancient Etruscan prophecy claims that the return of Satan will be precipitated by the arrival of eighteen physically perfect beings. To enable the prophecy to come to fruition, a secret sect of monks joins an obsessed geneticist to create the perfect specimens artificially.
Music scholar Hugh Stanton lives in America with his wife Norah and their teenage daughter Lucy. Lucy's good looks are beginning to attract attention, and she dreams of becoming a professional model, but Norah is opposed to this.
Norah dies in an unexplained fall from the roof of a tall building, seemingly a suicide, after a brief meeting with a mysterious Etruscan priest, Father Simeon. In the aftermath of her death, Hugh receives an invitation to visit a Roman church which allegedly contains "the world's oldest church organ". He and Lucy move to Italy, where they settle down in the former Etruscan areas north of the Eternal City.
With little to do while her father is at work, Lucy begins to explore her surroundings - in particular an old monastery, despite warnings from locals. A scientist (who was fired after performing unethical experiments on corpses) now works in the old building. As it transpires, he has been hired by the Etruscan priest who, it is insinuated, may have arranged the death of the girl's mother, in order to trick Hugh and Lucy into visiting the ancient land of the Etruscans.
In the old building, seventeen young girls are clinically brain dead, but kept alive by the scientist. The scientist, unaware of his employer’s true intentions, is just glad to be able to continue his questionable experiments, regardless.
According to the Etruscan prophecy, the number of eighteen special girls are required for it to be fulfilled. Could Lucy be number eighteen?
Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club was critical of film writing that the "mixture of the Satanic and the mundane results in a number of conceits and juxtapositions generally more silly than terrifying" and that it fails "to create the atmosphere of Old Testament dread that the material so desperately needs."[1]