This, of course, attracts the attention of the national press and the Catholic church, who send in a priest to try and disprove Alice’s claims that the Virgin Mary is helping her perform miracles. The next day Alice is able to talk, hear and – best of all – cure the locals of their ailments, including making a disabled boy walk, which Fenn captures on camera. Solving that little mystery quickly and, it must be said, quite amusingly, Fenn then discovers a doll wrapped in chains and hidden inside a tree, and when he breaks the doll – said to be used by farmers to help with plentiful harvests – he unwittingly unleashes the spirit within, whose name is Mary and who reaches out to deaf-mute local girl Alice (the wonderfully named Cricket Brown), the niece of the local clergy Father Hagan (William Sandler). He plays Gerry Fenn, a disgraced reporter visiting the small town of Banfield to investigate why a cow has had a mysterious symbol appear on its backside. That said, Jeffrey Dean Morgan appears to be having a good time and that is despite the very dour tone of the film. Yeah, it might have worked in 2001 – and possibly in 2006 when the processor chip in the Hollywood computer graphics computer that they use for these movies finally caught up but in 2021 you cannot get away with such cheap and nasty trickery, unless you’re spoofing that particular craze and The Unholy is definitely not a spoof. You know the ones – there’s a pixelated spectre whose face you can’t see, it moves closer to the screen, it’s body contorts in a jerky motion (because somebody in the executive’s office remembered watching Ringu or The Grudge – you know, one of those Japanese horror movies that are popular, can’t remember which one – and thought it looked cool) and just as everything goes still for a few seconds it leaps at the camera in a desperate bid to make us jump. However, we are not talking contemporary 21st century filmmaking but rather the kind of CGI jump-scare-heavy exercises in tedium that major studios were putting out on a regular basis during the previous decade. Finally, there are some visuals in this film (early and in the very end) that make absolutely zero sense and almost like they were purposely there for a trailer.Starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Cricket Brown, William Sadler, Cary Elwes, Christine Adams and Katie Aselton.Ī deaf-mute girl appears to be cured after a visitation from what she thinks is the Virgin Mary but a disgraced reporter discovers differently.īased on James Herbert’s 1983 story Shrine, The Unholy is the kind of horror movie you don’t see get made very much these days, and although that could be construed as a good thing by being similar in story to the sort of religious-themed folky occult horror you used to get in the 1960s and’70s, the reality is much different.ĭifferent because yes, the story, plot and themes of The Unholy are quite old-fashioned and somewhat straightforward by today’s more socially and politically conscious standards but the execution is very much a product of 21st century studio-made horror movie-making. If you are a film fan I would definitely skip it. If you are a horror fan aching for some new horror - I would skip. In fact, without any reshoots and just some simple editing choices, I feel this movie could've been a lot better (and even saved some money on some horrid CGI). The real shame is that the film does seem like it could be saved. Both messages feel unearned and almost slapped together. In the end, you are left with two messages: one about truth and one about faith.
Despite how fast-paced the movie seems, it still feels like it's dragging on at times. A lot of the rules established in the film are broken even minutes after being created. The writing holds the viewer's hand in an already simple plot. The horror film is centered exclusively around jump scares and with that exception has zero horror. The writing holds the viewer's hand The Unholy is an awkward film that ultimately tries to leave the viewer with a positive message but not even a positive message can make this a good film. The Unholy is an awkward film that ultimately tries to leave the viewer with a positive message but not even a positive message can make this a good film.
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