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.
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.