Roman Diocese Tells ‘Angels And Demons’ To Go To H-E-Double Hockey Sticks

The problem with filming the devil’s movies is that if any of the scenes require the architecture of a church, the owners of said church, along with their serious-minded boards of directors, must pass off on it.

This is where Angels and Demons has recently run into trouble. There is a scene in the book where Tom Hanks & a hot German woman named Elsa (who’d only recently slept with his father) break through a church floor, follow some flowing gasoline through a gathered crowd of rats to an old dead knight with a clue on his shield.

Now they can’t film any of this on location - the Rome Diocese has banned it.

The location slack will reportedly be picked up by two Kingdom Halls and a Mormon stake center. This of course means not a single gargoyle will be shot on camera. It’s bad because they need a gargoyle that comes to life just in time to save Tom Hanks from the exploding jelly truck. It’s really a pinnacle scene.

Thanks a lot, Diocese.

When The Da Vinci Code burst on to movie screens just before the book based on it was released, thousands of people everywhere cheered because it had been advertised as a Harry Potter sequel. Then, of course, it wasn’t and people cut theater screens with pocket knives out of rage.

Those people should have listened to the Catholic church - they’d been warning since Paul’s first epistle to the Romans not to see that movie. After seeing it ourselves we think the reasoning may just have been the poor plot line.

Whatever the reason, now Dan Brown’s prequel book Angels & Demons is in Italy getting filmed, and they needed some church locations to do so.

On this front all is not going well, as the New York Times will no doubt tell you:

“Two years after Vatican officials urged a boycott of the film “The Da Vinci Code,” based on Mr. Brown’s blockbuster novel, the Rome diocese said Monday that two churches had been declared off limits to film crews for “Angels & Demons,” the “Da Vinci Code” prequel, The Associated Press reported. Msgr. Marco Fibbi, a spokesman for the diocese, said that the film “does not conform to our views” and “treats religious issues in a way that contrasts with common religious sentiment.” Permission to film inside Santa Maria del Popolo, above, and Santa Maria della Vittoria, both in central Rome, was denied in 2007, but the situation did not become crucial until now because production of the movie was delayed by the writers’ strike.”

Luckily the ban only means the insides of the churches are off limits - the outsides are still a go. Maybe with a system of harnesses and a sideways camera the scenes could be shot with Tom Hanks walking along an outer wall as if it were an inner floor. CGI could be used to put in a ceiling and visually fix the gravitational pull on that bad wig.

We’re just throwing out options here.