Mary Elnor is a young woman being accused of Witchcraft in Banfield, Massachusetts, in 1845. She is being hanged from a tree, and then lit on fire by an angry mob, who also bounds her spirit to the body of a doll before she takes her final breath.
Years later, we meet Gerry Fenn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who is a journalist who has gotten his reputation thrown into the gutter after being caught faking cases just to get publicity. He’s on an assignment which leads him to Boston, where he is going to look into a case of a cow with so-called satanic markings on it (which proves to be a teenage prank). Before deciding to leave the place and look for other means of stories that can give him some much-needed income, he finds the tree where Mary was hanged, and also the doll which was once “hidden” (in the very visible and big hole of the tree trunk…). He crushes the doll, and of course, then freeing the evil spirit of Mary Elnor.
After it gets dark and Gerry has decided to leave the place and return home, he sees a young girl run across the road to the tree where he found the doll earlier, and hears her speaking before fainting right in front of the tree. He takes the girl to a church nearby, and learns that her name is Alice and that she is actually deaf and can’t speak. This peaks his interest as he knows he heard her speak just moments before, and decides to stay around town to follow this strange case a bit further. Soon, Alice brings publicity from both close and far as not only does she now speak, but she claims that she was cured by the Virgin Mary, and she also starts healing people. When Gerry finds out that the so-called Virgin Mary is not what Alice believes her to be, but is instead a sinister entity, he tries to reveal what is actually the truth for once.
The Unholy is directed by Evan Spiliotopoulos, and is also his directional debut. It is based on a novel from 1983 by James Herbert, called Shrine. In the leading role we find Jeffrey Dean Morgan, whom most people probably know best as the villain “Negan” from The Walking Dead, but he also played the father of Supernatural-duo Sam & Dean. And oh boy, does this movie have a few cheesy Supernatural-vibes indeed!
The movie’s opening sequence leaves no mystery to be revealed, we already know that “Mary” isn’t the Virgin Mary, but the witch that was executed in 1845, Mary Elnor. Since we already know what’s going on, it’s hard to build any real suspense or sense of mystery, so the progress forward relies heavily on actor performances and character interactions. Fortunately, Jeffrey Dean Morgan does a solid job as the journalist who has fallen from grace and needs to turn his career around, only to find himself facing a dilemma: knowing that he’s now got a real, true case in his hands (not just another hoax), but also finding out that there’s something sinister going on, and that profiting from this case might not be the best moral decision. Thus, the lead character carries much of the movie. As for the villain, Mary Elnor herself, she does unfortunately not come off as the least bit scary. Often when she appears on screen, with her jerky movements and overly villainous treats, you almost feel like you should get your controller in hand and prepare yourself for a video-game boss battle. Like you’re watching some kind of cutscene before a fight. It does add another layer of cheese, however, and makes her appearances particularly entertaining.
And with all of that being said: The Unholy is not a scary movie, not even creepy. But if you can enjoy it as an easy-going popcorn flick with a little bit of B-grade cheese here and there (or like some kind of long Supernatural episode with Sam & Dean’s dad going on a solo-adventure), you’ll probably get some entertainment out of it.
Director: Evan Spiliotopoulos
Country & year: USA, 2021
Actors: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Cricket Brown, William Sadler, Katie Aselton, Cary Elwes, Diogo Morgado, Bates Wilder, Marina Mazepa, Christine Adams, Dustin Tucker, Gisela Chipe, Danny Corbo, Sonny Corbo
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt9419056/
John Trent used to be a freelance insurance investigator, who is now a patient in a psychiatric hospital. One day, Dr. Wrenn visits him, where Trent recounts his story: after the disappearance of the popular horror novelist Sutter Cane, Trent is having lunch with a colleague. Suddenly, Trent is attacked by an axe-wielding man who is shot dead by the police, and is later revealed to be Cane’s agent. This man went insane after reading one of Cane’s books, and killed his family as a result. And he is not the only one…apparently, some people seem to go crazy after reading Cane’s novels. Shortly afterwards, Trent is hired by the director of Arcane Publishing who wants him to investigate Cane’s disappearance, and also to recover the manuscript for his final novel. Linda Styles, who is Cane’s editor, is assigned to accompany him. While she explains to Trent that Cane’s novels are known to cause paranoia, disorientation and memory loss in some readers, Trent believes it’s all hogwash and considers his disappearance to be a bluff, something done entirely as a publicity stunt. But bizarre phenomena starts happening, and during their investigation, Trent and Linda enters a small town which looks like and includes people that are exactly as described in one of Cane’s fictional novels. Is it all staged, or is something else at play?
Judith Albright suffers a stroke on her 70th birthday, and is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She is moved to a nursing home, a beautiful old-fashioned mansion. While her grandson opposes the move, both Judith and her daughter Barbara insists that this is what will be best for everyone. Judith is a given a room which she shares with another woman. Her roommate is called Annette, but she is nothing but a disturbed, babbling fool who clutches her bible like her life depends on it. Upon staying at the home for a short while, Judith is starting to witness strange behaviour in several of the residents, but doesn’t think much of it, considering that many of the people there are suffering from dementia and are prone to be confused and acting strangely. She befriends a group of other residents whom she starts playing bridge with, and things seem to be rather well…until one evening, when Annette is more disturbed than ever, especially after the cat Ozzie jumps into her bed. That night, Judith wakes up and sees a dark shadow leaning over Annette, and no one believes her about what she’s seen. When Annette dies and Judith also starts seeing that shadow creature in the bedroom, she knows something is very wrong at the nursing home, but of course…no one will believe an old, confused woman…
We’re supposed to be somewhere in Romania during the middle-ages, where some evil iron-masked barbarian named Nikos (embodied by Andreas Schnaas) is ready to be executed in a cave by an angry mob. The tone is set in stone already during the first seconds with its horrendous bad lighting, grainy muddy images, bonkers acting with cartoonish dialogue deliveries, and the sheer atmosphere of zero-budget reeking all over the place. It’s what to expect from Andreas Schnaas, if you’re already familiar with his home-made and chaotic splatter films. And just forget about any thick Romanian accents, here they speak fluently American. God bless. Anyway … before they cuts out his entrails and sets him on fire, we get dialogues such as:
We are in one of the darker corners of Hollywood, Los Angeles, where the young man Raymond Everett (Lenny Von Dohlen) owns a horror-themed wax museum. One day he gets some new deliveries, all the way from Romania, one of which is a casket that contains something you’ll never guess what – Vanessa, Dracula’s widow (Sylvia Kristel). Yes, a living, bloodsucking vampire. So why has she gotten herself all the way over to Los Angeles, you may wonder? No one knows. She doesn’t know, the script doesn’t know, even the Man Who Knows poster we see on the wall on Raymond’s apartment, doesn’t know. So where do we go from here? Who knows.
Jessica is a recently widowed woman, who has decided to move on with her life and start afresh. While traveling, she encounters a suspicious-looking guy multiple times. Hoping that it’s all a coincidence, things become pretty evident when she crashes her car due to a slashed tire. The creep who has been stalking her manages to drug and kidnap her, and the cat ‘n mouse game has started.
A quiet drifter finds himself in a situation where he’s stranded in an isolated little town. His car is in need of repairs, but he’s not able to pay for it…however, he gets an opportunity to pay for the expenses by spending a night in an abandoned family fun center called Willy’s Wonderland, by cleaning it from top to bottom and thus preparing it for its supposed re-opening. While locked inside the place, however, he finds himself in battle with a bunch of possessed animatronic mascots whose obvious intent is to rip him apart.
Miles Grissom (Clark Freeman) is a man who struggles with an intense fear of dying, ever since he at the age of three watched his father die in a car accident. His anxiety is so severe that he won’t drive a car, will barely leave his apartment, and suffers from night terrors. In a desperate attempt to get rid of his fears, he places an advert in a newspaper, offering 30.000 dollars to whoever can show him evidence that we go on after our deaths. When his mother finds out about his advert, she scoffs and mocks him, telling him he will never get anything except a lot of kook calls. And, well…he does have to go through a bunch of videos from people who are either clearly insane, or clearly fraudsters. After a lot of work (with a bit of help from mommy) he narrows down the responses to three candidates: a scientist, a medium, and a wordly entrepreneur. Will any of them bring him definite proof of life after death? And if that happens…will he really get the peace he’s longing for?
The Porter family is camping in the woods somewhere in France, where they are brutally attacked by someone (or something), leaving the wife as the only survivor. She is severely wounded, and claims that her husband and young son were eaten alive by a strong man. Soon afterwards a Romanian man named Talek Gwynek who lives in the woods with his mother, is arrested and accused of being the killer. Kate Moore is assigned to be his lawyer, and together with investigator Eric Sarin and animal expert Gavin Flemyng, they believe that the accused man is innocent as the attack bears a clear resemblance of a vicious animal attack, which could not be done by a human. At least, not a normal human…