Unholy

2007 "Beware of the experiment..."
3.4| 1h30m| en
Details

Martha, a widow living in rural Pennsylvania, comes home to find her daughter about to blow her own head off with a shotgun in the basement of their house. Martha doesn't succeed in stopping her child's horrific demise, but the girl's death gradually leads the grieving mother to investigate a conspiracy that involves a legendary local witch, Nazi dabbling with the occult, and secret government experiments, with the story even referencing the fabled Philadelphia Experiment

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Also starring Richard Ziman

Reviews

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.
SteinMo What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.
Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.
Chantel Contreras It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.
xanderlavelle Well.... I have to admit that I am a huge fan of "Buffy" and because of that I did watch this movie because it's with Nicholas Brendon. I have to say, that I cannot say anything against his acting, because he is doing a great or even the best job of all the actors on this movie.Adrienne Barbeau, the main actress cannot ban the audience to the screen because her acting is beyond professional. She never gives you the feeling she is doing something for real and it may be the problem with the whole movie. As a main actor you have to carry the plot and if you suck, then the whole movie might do it as well.I have to admit that the plot also is not so exciting and the special effects lack of persuasion. Even shock effects are not there because e.g. when oh so scary graphics are flipped by the characters there is this sound effect which shall imply you that this should be scary but you are just like "Yeah, I got it... but there is nothing frightening at all...Can you skip to the next part already!" And there is one point when the actress just screams for Lucas all the time, which will clearly annoy you as much as it did annoy me.I think a horror movie is hard to create because you easily can stumble into a comedy. In this example it is neither. This movie lacks of excitement, a good plot and the genre specifics. Not worth the watch
MBunge Unholy does have a halfway decent double-twist ending. One is pretty much a standard time travel cliché and the other is both a rip off of Total Recall and doesn't actually make any sense, but combined they're not all bad. To get to that barely passable conclusion, however, you've got to sit through 85+ minutes of very slow and rather stupid storytelling. It starts with a premise that far outstrips this film's less than meager budget, continues by never establishing even the slightest bit of normality, inserts a couple of moments that look like unintentional parody and winds down with disappointment over not seeing Adrienne Barbeau's well-aged rack.Martha (Adrienne Barbeau) is a woman far past middle aged whose seemingly disturbed daughter kills herself in their cellar. Martha thinks her girl's last rants about an experiment meant something, so with the rather useless aid of her loser son Lucas (Nicholas Brendon), she sets out to investigate. Through some incredible convenient coincidences, Martha finds indications of a government conspiracy involving a Nazi necromancer and the so-called "unholy trinity" of mad scientist experiments - time travel, invisibility and mind control. It's all just a chore to sit through until that double-twist ending brings blessed relief.The primary problem with Unholy isn't that it had such a small budget the cast probably got paid in Spam, nor that it's written on such a shallow level that an important plot point is a cellar door that's built like a venetian blind. No, what's fundamentally wrong with this thing is that it...is…damn…slow. It has absolutely no sense of pace, with scenes that crawl along like a snail and sputter off into oblivion. And since this isn't all that wordy of a script, that means Unholy is dragged down by silent nothingness. By the time anything happens in this movie, you've already been beaten down into apathy and can't care. Not that anything which happens in Unholy is worth caring about in the first place. A lesson for all low budget, inexperienced or plain ol' crappy filmmakers is that speed is your friend and sloth is your enemy. The longer anything takes on screen, from a plot thread to a scene to lines of dialog, the more people pay attention to it and the better it must be. The quicker something goes by, the less the audience will notice or be bothered by how much it sucks.The second big flaw here is common to far too many horror flicks. Unholy starts out weird and never creates a sense of the ordinary for the viewer to grab onto. It is the contrast between the normal and abnormal that give these kind of films their emotional resonance. Without that contrast, horror movies are just noise that might be loud enough to bother some people, but that's all. I know that setting the stage of people living ordinary lives in an ordinary world before taking a sharp turn into the terrifying can feel awfully cliché when you're writing a script, but you do it that way because it works. Trying to get around that step in the process, again requires you to be really good. If you're an inexperienced or unsuccessful filmmaker with virtually no money to spend, don't let your ego get in the way.Adrienne Barbeau and Nichola Brendon are professional actors and look like it in Unholy. The rest of the cast are the sort who hope to be professional actors someday but will end up as professional waiters.Unholy isn't utterly without merit. There's just too much garbage to wade through and nothing all that good on the other side.
bobwildhorror I've read some terrible things about this film, so I was prepared for the worst. "Confusing. Muddled. Horribly structured." While there may be merit to some of these accusations, this film was nowhere near as horrific as your average DVD programmer. In fact, it actually had aspirations. It attempted something beyond the typical monster/slasher nonsense. And by god, there are some interesting things going on.Ms. Barbeau is a miracle to behold. She carries the film squarely on her shoulders.This is not to say that it's a masterpiece. UNHOLY ultimately collapses under the weight of its own ambition. There are just too many (unexplained) subplots trying to coexist. And the plot loopholes created by time travel are never really addressed: for example, if Hope knows that her mother is evil and that she will ultimately kill her brother, then why doesn't she just kill Ma in the film's very first sequence? Seems like it would have beat the hell out of traveling into the future to do it.Still, I give UNHOLY points for trying. A little ambition is not a bad thing.
kaneda-ku This is a movie of tired, yet weirdly childish, clichés. There's a Nazi witch master performing sf-related experiments in the basement? Oh please! Aiming for a creeping sense of horror and fear, the general impression of the film is that of a very immature conception of fright. Not having any expectations beforehand, I am left with: an aged Xander from Buffy and a heroine with ape-like face who doesn't seem to know how to act. Said Adrienne Barbeau have I only only encountered before in the much more enjoyable "Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death".Camera and editing adds to the general impression of lame.