The Unholy

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D+

              I went to the movies twice this week (to make up for an absence last week) and I actually saw Godzilla vs. Kong on the first trip. However, I’m reviewing The Unholy first because my brain is already struggling to retain the fact that this movie exists. Despite an oddly amazing cast and real potential in the basic setup, The Unholy is a boring, poorly-written composite of the same bullshit clichés that appear in every goddamn one of these modern PG-13 possession/haunting horror movies. I’ve said this a million times because I feel like I’ve seen this movie a million times: These frigging movies aren’t scary. I understand my cat’s abject fear of the ceiling fan more than I understand why I’m stuck with this kind of crap as the standard for modern horror.

               Based on the novel Shrine by English horror novelist James Herbert, The Unholy begins with a witch being burned and hung from a tree in Massachusetts in 1845. It’s important to note that this is the opening scene of the film, because it is then treated as a mystery for the rest of the fucking movie for some reason. We flash forward to modern day when a down-on-his-luck journalist (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) happens upon the tree and unknowingly releases the spirit of the witch. A local deaf and mute girl named Alice goes to the tree, suddenly gains the ability to speak, claims to be communicating with the Virgin Mary and begins performing miracles in Mary’s name. Is she actually communicating with the Virgin Mary or some other, more sinister spirit? Well, movie, you already told me the answer in the opening scene, so I’m not sure why the screenwriter assumes that I have the memory of a fucking goldfish. But we still get to spend 90 minutes watching our main character solve this “mystery.” Don’t worry, not much happens in the meantime.

               I’m guessing that the source novel may actually be decent because there are elements here that could (and I emphasize could) work. The concept of an innocent person becoming a false prophet and unwittingly serving the devil is an interesting one and could make for a solid, religion-themed horror film with serious philosophical questions (it also reminded me a bit of the Exorcist prequel; the Paul Schrader version, not the Renny Harlin version). I haven’t read any of James Herbert’s novels, but I remember that he was held in fairly high regard in horror magazines when I was a kid, so I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt here. The film even begins fairly well. The opening POV scene of the witch being executed was solid (I was thinking it was akin to a PG-13 version of the opening of The Beyond), the location is suitably creepy and I was generally surprised by the level of potential that I felt in the film’s first ten minutes or so. Then it all goes to shit.

               Aside from the baffling narrative choice to reveal the central mystery at the start and then continue to treat it as a mystery, this is just more of the same old crap that has come to define the genre in recent years. What could have been an ethically and theologically interesting horror story quickly dissolves into the usual horseshit jump scares and jarring noises that have come to replace both suspense and gore. I mean, why set up anything genuinely frightening when you can just have the villain jump at the screen for no reason accompanied by the sound of what seems to be a squirrel being chucked at a piano? And that works so well, why not do it a dozen fucking times? This gives me more reason to give the novel a pass because books usually don’t rely on jump scares and the 1983 novel probably didn’t include a ghost jumping out of a laptop. What’s even better is the witch/ghost, a computer-generated villain that looks like it was created on somebody’s phone during their lunch hour. She looks like a lazy interpretation of The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in a low-budget version of Scrooge made by people that hate Christmas, complete with a hood and the fact that she seems to be seven-feet tall for no reason. This is just pure laziness on every creative level.  

               I do need to comment quickly on the cast because they are trying, damn it. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is excellent and seems to be almost as disappointed in the film as I was as time went on. I have a soft spot for alcoholic journalist/detective characters and he nails it to the point that I would want to see this character in another (far, far better) film. The movie also features Cary Elwes and the great William Sadler in prominent roles and simply seeing these three actors working together should have elevated the material. You are talking about a serious pile of nonsense when I can’t get any entertainment value out of a movie featuring these three dudes.

               I expected more from a horror film from the guy that wrote Cinderella 3 and Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure. The Unholy is the first horror film in theaters since November, but it feels like just yesterday that I last saw the modern horror cocktail of jump scares, loud noises and CGI ghosts without an ounce of blood, suspense or genuine fright in sight. I’ve been told that I’m just out of touch and this is the kind of horror movies that kids like now. Well, I don’t give a shit. Those kids can get off my lawn and take their shitty, watered-down, PG-13 horror movies with them.

Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unholy_(2021_film)#/media/File:The_Unholy_2021_Film_Poster.png