Given that it has quite a strong story and committed performances from most of its cast it seems a real shame that nobody trusted the material enough to give The Unholy the proper care and attention it needed to bring out the dread, instead opting for quick and easy jump-scares that even the most commercial filmmakers knocking out direct-to-DVD dreck eased up on using about five years ago. Naturally, things don’t go to plan once Uncle Hagan starts doubting what he is seeing and Gerry Fenn’s old journalistic instincts start to unravel the truth, but given his less-than-honourable reputation who will believe him? 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. 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.
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