Paul Bettany's pugilistic Papist is the strangest thing to show at WonderCon.

Last July I saw a brief sizzle reel of some of the most eye-popping fantasy imagery put to film.  For days I was buzzing, telling everyone I knew just how radical this movie was going to be.  That movie was called Sucker Punch.
With this in mind allow me to report that the sound-and-light show that is the footage displayed for Scott Stewart's Priest has me equally juiced.
We could focus on this as being a re-teaming of director and actor from last year's Legion, or we could spin it as the marriage of the head of special effects house The Orphanage adapting a well-regarded Korean manga.
Despite hearing an hour-long pitch for the movie I still can't really tell you what the (no doubt) baffling story is exactly about, except that it is in some futureworld where Vampires are now living on reservations after a great battle between them and Church-trained priests.
The backstory is rendered in an absolutely gorgeous animation sequence from  Genndy Tartakovsky.  Eyeballs pop out of skulls, bodies fill the battlefield and the images shift from lurid, to impressionistic, to utilizing negative space to reminding me of Pink Floyd: The Wall.
The next bit was live action (a bit of a come-down, to be honest) where Paul Bettany goes to a vampire reservation, searching for a missing girl.
After he and his companion creep around ugly corridors they discover some sketchy pale dudes who put up a fight.
The Priests seem to be holding their own until the sun goes down - and that's where the vampires come in.
They're purplish-blue, have nasty teeth and kinda look like lickers from Resident Evil. They sure don't look like the Cullens. They jump around as CG creatures have a tendency to do and don't look at all pleasant.
The real fun comes when Bettany starts to (and I'm not kidding you) pray.  He hums us a few bars of The Lord's Prayer, then opens up a liturgical book.  Crucifixes and other papal icons come flying out in slo-motion and turn into ninja throwing stars.
Then the ass-kicking commences, to music that includes pipe organ.
I half-expected him to whip out the  Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.
What followed was one of the most sizzling of sizzle reels I've ever seen.  In three-second flashes we see a Blade Runner-esque city, a Mad Max-like wasteland, statues that look like the  Buddhas of Bamiyan, Karl Urban dressed like The Man With No Name, Christopher Plummer as "The Monsignor" on a video display and Maggie Q attacking a creature on a motorbike with a whip then exploding his body parts into bloody chunks.  To the tune of "Personal Jesus."