The year is 1991, and club owner Don Nedler opens The Lizard Lounge at 2424 Swiss Avenue in Dallas, TX. The Lizard Lounge would become one of Dallas’ go-to places for techno/rave culture including being at least partially responsible for breaking huge DJs like Moby and a must-play club for big electronic music figures like Paul Oakenfold who liked the club for both its acoustics and atmosphere, complete with huge, ornate chandelier and stained glass windows. The most successful aspect of The Lizard Lounge would be it’s Sunday night goth dance party, dubbed “The Church”, introduced in 1994 based on an idea Nedler got from a Miami club. The Church would become one of the hippest goth clubs in the country, playing host to numerous important bands in the goth, industrial and dark wave scene and being lorded over by DJ Joe Virus, who brought his deep and expansive knowledge of the darker corners of underground music into The Church, molding it into what it would be most well-known for. The Church would later introduce one of its most popular events, the controversial annual Fetish Ball, where people were free to parade their kinks on stage for an adoring and accepting crowd. Unfortunately, The Lizard Lounge would be forced to close permanently during COVID lockdown, but Nedler has since resurrected The Church in another Dallas location the It’ll Do Club.

If any documentary is within Cleopatra’s wheelhouse, it is this one. Suffused with the kind of dark electronic/goth/industrial music that has been Cleopatra’s bread and butter, The Church is a kind of embodiment of everything that the long-running music label represents, a sacrilegious reverence that captures a certain twisted dichotomy finding a balance in the sacred and profane. Some going into this doc may be thinking to themselves, “Why is some random club is Dallas, Texas worth dedicating a whole movie to? It can’t have been THAT important…” Yet, Dark Sanctuary makes a compelling argument otherwise. While the doc follows closely the lives of owner Nedler as well as key DJ Joe Virus, it also features interviews with important artists in the scene like cEvin Key of Skinny Puppy (who guest-DJed at The Church on at least one occasion), Patrick Codenys of Front 242 and Bill Leeb of Frontline Assembly. Having titans of industrial speaking of the importance of The Church definitely lends credence to its role as a center of the goth/industrial underground in the ’90s and on into the 2000s. If this were a Hollywood movie, we would end with The Church reclaiming its former glory and coming back better than ever. But this isn’t a movie. It’s real life. The Lizard Lounge did close in 2020 due to the pandemic. While Nedler resurrected The Church at the It’ll Do Club, the footage we see of the new digs seems a hollow shell of its former glory. It’ll Do with its low ceilings and old skating rink look just doesn’t capture the same vibe as the footage we’ve just seen over the previous 90 minutes of The Church at its height. The film even ends with Joe Virus leaving The Church to move out to the California desert. It tries to end on a positive note. They talk about how The Church was always more about the people who came than it was about a building. Joe Virus talks about his new life with new friends. But there’s a melancholy undercurrent of loss that seeps through this whole section. It just reinforces how special The Church really was… How it was a magical kind of lightning in a bottle of time, place and people that all came together to create a one-of-a-kind experience.

The video quality is pretty typical of a modern documentary. The archival footage is naturally of highly variable quality while the new interview segments and nice and clean digital images with no noticeable distortion or damage in the source. Overall, it’s a solid presentation. The audio is similarly largely clear and free of any significant damage with the exception of a few of the archival clips. But even most of the clips sound pretty solid. And the original music written for the film by cEvin Key sounds really nice in the native 2.0 stereo. For extras, we have a series of extended interviews with cEvin Key , Paul Oakenfold and Aurelio Voltaire and three music videos from Joe Virus’ band Solemn Assembly, all of which include footage of The Church.

Dark Sanctuary takes us on a fascinating journey to a place that many didn’t know existed yet makes a compelling argument for how important it was to a certain legion of people who needed a kind of dark release they couldn’t get elsewhere. Not only does this doc succeed in capturing the feel of The Church, it makes me wish I had been able to go there myself.