Holy shit, what a bore

A good Catholic horror film does more than harness the fear of devotees. Like the most gifted of the fire and brimstone evangelists, this is scary persuasive, sending a thrill of religious terror down the aisles and into the thorns of even the most loyal atheists. That makes believers unbelievers, if only for a few hours filled with pea soup. The ungodly, who arrives this Easter weekend to incite the most fearsome to God and the less vocal in the movies, clearly yearns for a cannon of Hollywood nightmares from the Sunday School program. Yet despite its serious warnings about a wolf draped in sheep’s clothing, the film never taps into the chilling power of scripture’s most enduring fear tactics. He is the most fragile of the hokum, possessing all the gravity of a bible seller who throws his goods outside the subway.

In the small town of Banfield, Massachusetts, a miracle happened. Alice (Cricket Brown), a deaf and mute teenager since birth, can suddenly hear and speak! It is the Virgin Mary, she insists, who provided her with these gifts – an assertion that becomes more plausible as Alice begins to act as a faith healer in her Christian community, banishing cancer and paralysis while relaying messages from the Blessed Mother whispering in her newly functioning ears . For disgraced journalist Gerry Fenn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), this remarkable event offers a chance for redemption: several years after being caught fabricating Stephen Glass-style facts, Gerry has found himself at the center of the breaking news. . Whether Alice is the real deal or not, he has the exclusive access that could save his declining career. (Gerry goes down in history trying to whip up a $ 150 tabloid; if nothing else, The ungodly taps into the frightening horror of the freelance hustle and bustle.)

Morgan, with his wry smile and bewildered conman (that balance between smarm and charm which has earned him so many roles as a magnetic scoundrel), is ideally presented as a voice of skepticism: he is a good substitute for the audience, almost holding on to the outside of the story and looking inside. – and, in fact, a walking emblem of the film’s sensationalist opportunism. The ungodly has the majestic aura (and endless speech) of a sermon, but it’s really a squeaky nothing of a B-movie, like a chintzy Halloween exhibit set up in an old church. It wouldn’t take any religious scholar, or even a diligent student of the genre, to guess that Alice’s supernatural mentor may be sitting a little south of heaven. The plot comes to involve spooky porcelain dolls nestled in hollows, statues crying blood, the impossible date of February 31, and one Black sunday flashback filmed from the point of view convicts. Above all, however, The ungodly is a platform for his generic secret beast: a clawed, staggering anti-deity who comes to life through shockingly low-quality special effects and pops up every few minutes or so to pierce the air of godly respectability with a fear of leaping. cheap.

Making his behind-the-camera debut after a lucrative career with Disney franchise expansions and forgettable blockbusters, writer-director Evan Spiliotopoulos flirts with genuinely provocative directions, only to ditch them in favor of half-ass. Presage moves. What would it be like to be instantly immersed in a world of sound after a lifetime of silence? The ungodly makes no assumptions – Alice is grateful and radiant, adjusting seamlessly to her new sensory reality. At the start of the film, the Vatican sends an investigator (Diogo Morgado) to verify that the miracles are legitimate; that the holiest of institutions deploys an official skeptic is scheming (and seemingly true to life), but Spiliotopoulos does so little with this church agent that his scenes could easily be cut. The film, adapted from the 1983 James Herbert novel Tomb, reduces all its characters to spokespersons, exchanging formidable arguments on the power and the danger of faith. (Cary Elwes, Katie Aselton and William Sadler are some of the good actors struggling desperately with dialogue that seems scrawled in stone, impossible to deliver with passion.)

The closest thing to surprise in the movie is the reveal, in the end credits, that Sam Raimi produced it. Deadite’s conjurer made his own Old Testament cooler a few years ago with a wacky funhouse prank of moral comeuppance, Drag me to hell. In its demonic way, this film truly immersed audiences in a deep-rooted fear of damnation – it gave the threat of eternal Catholic retribution a primitive immediacy of the monster film. Despite Raimi’s involvement, there is no such crazy conviction for The ungodly. In the end, it’s a simple warning not to fall in love with false prophets, draped in a lot of scary second-hand tactics. Perhaps the lesson can be extended to church goers and moviegoers: beware of the solemn schlock, which comes to you The Exorcistthe clothes but inside Stigmata the best.