But once the story is underway and the mysteries are revealed, the mood is undone. There's whispered dialogue about the ancient mechanisms of good and evil and God and the devil. The Unholy is set in a small town where faith plays a key role, which means old churches and plenty of statues and candles, stained-glass windows, and other symbols - and even a creaky church basement and a musty old book.
#Unholy near me movie
That’s an edge Morgan should have fought to keep.This atmospheric horror movie starts off well, with plenty of intriguing imagery and history, but it eventually drifts into autopilot, falling back on routine scares, lazy dialogue, and shortcuts. The converted “believer” is always more dramatically dull than that the cynic who holds out to the bitter end.
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It’s the “Ace in the Hole” that makes such characters a reliable “type” in any movie where faith, hope and naivete have to confront the cold, hard truth. The script fritters away frights and suspense as if that isn’t the whole point of it all.Īnd Finn needs to hang onto that nasty edge. The rising terror of the wraith that is responsible for all this - a VERY good and creepy effect, BTW - doesn’t “rise” at all. “Isn’t there something in the Bible about ‘forgiving the sinner his sins? Kind of a major plot point?”īut the air goes out of this horror balloon when Finn sobers up and the picture turns all serious, trying to “explain” all that’s going on like the worst parts of most horror movies, losing itself in Catholic Church exploitation of the new “shrine” planned for the village of Banfield. “Does EVERYone quote the Bible around here?”įinn fends off questions about his reputation with aplomb. Morgan is terrific in showing Finn’s cynicism, the “sell your soul for a story” shortcuts he’s willing to take to get back to where he was a decade ago, and his sarcastic take on faith and “miracles.” Next thing you know, the Archbishop ( Cary Elwes) is giving the media slide shows about miracles at Lourdes and Fatima, a Jesuit “inquisitor” ( Diogo Morgado) is brought in to “disprove” (or prove) the miracles, according to Vatican doctrine, and Finn has “exclusive” access to the now-talkative young lady whom the locals insist “will be bigger than Taylor Swift” once word gets out.įinn makes damned sure that word does get out. The church has itself a controversy, and quite possibly a genuine miracle on its hands. Nobody believes him until she starts talking to everybody - the doctor, her uncle, the priest (William Sadler) and then the masses. At least “blood alcohol level” threats from the town doctor ( Katie Aselton) sober him up.īut that girl? Alice ( Cricket Brown) has been deaf and mute since birth. And almost running over a barefoot local teen, running down the road in her nightgown, doesn’t wise him up, either. When Finn smashes the doll, cooks up some supernatural reason for it, gets a photo and mutters “NOW we have a story,” we know he’s got more of a “story” than he bargained for. What Finn doesn’t know is that “Unholy” opens with a grisly 1845 priest-sanctioned execution, seen from the victim’s point of view. It’s wrapped in chains, with a nonsense date attached - “Feb. He’s “fifteen, actually.” And you can finish that joke yourself.īut Finn stumbles across something that might replace the story-that-wasn’t, a “kern doll” buried beneath a gnarled, long-dead tree next to the small town’s Catholic church.
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The best scenes in the film are Finn’s jokey, eye-rolling reaction to a farmer’s claims about his cattle. He haggles over pay, tops off his take-out coffee from his flask and heads out to cover a rural New England “cattle mutilation.”
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Morgan plays Jerry Finn, once a star reporter for a major Boston newspaper, now scraping by on scraps from a website, a freelancer who lost his career in a scandal a decade before. It’s just that the picture loses itself and any momentum it has in “explaining” these wonders and healings as the work of a Mary who isn’t the “Virgin Mary” all involved assume it is. The effects are top notch and there are some chills in it. Biggest and best of all is the lead, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, cast as a cinematic cliche but delivering the goods as the latest take on the jaded, liquor-loving journalist trope, this time a disgraced reporter who specializes in the paranormal who stumbles across “real miracles.”īut the handsomely-mounted movie– writer-director Evan Spiliotopoulos’ adaptation of a 1983 novel - rather lets Morgan down as his character drifts from cynicism to True Believer.
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Producer Sam Raimi helped lure some big names to “The Unholy,” a Catholic “Our Lady’s no ‘lady'” thriller timed to hit theaters for Easter.