1/8/2024 0 Comments The unholy review![]() Cricket Brown ( Dukeland, Polaroid) plays spiritual conduit Alice Paget, Father Hagen’s niece born with speech and hearing loss.Īnother strong actor in the cast of The Unholy, is William Sadler ( Hawaii Five-O, Hudson Falls), starring as Father Hagen, the caretaker to Alice (Brown) and the small Catholic church at the center of the religious occurrence. The exceptional cast is lead by Jeffrey Dean Morgan ( The Walking Dead, Supernatural TV), who portrays disgraced, fame-seeking, alcoholic journalist Gerry Fenn. Spiliotopoulos weaves a unique story that exhibits an almost ethereal quality, holding to the book’s essential themes. He creates a world that revolves around the persistence of evil, and the possibility of redemption in The Unholy. Herbert is given writer credit, while Spiliotopoulos is recognized as the film’s screenwriter. The Unholy is based on the late James Herbert’s 1983 book, Shrine – a horror novel exploring religious ecstasy, mass hysteria, demonic possession, faith healing, and Catholicism. The writing goes slightly off the rails at the end, with the arm exhibiting somehow even less obedience for the laws of nature, but by that point, who would actually care? It's of course all nonsense, more than usual even within its own subgenre, but The Unholy is, fortunately, fun kind of nonsense.Award-winning Director, Evan Spiliotopoulos, of Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Snake Eyes (2021) brings experience and depth to The Unholy (2021). A gnarled, ugly thing with claws, the arm is the honey badger of body parts, it doesn't give a shit about the laws of physics or anything else, it just kills and kills and kills. The main characters, Mark the MEP and Julia the girl ring true enough, although the star of the show is the arm itself. The Unholy is a surprisingly atmospheric novel, with Halkin feasting on descriptions of fog on the banks of the Seine and car lights disapperaring into the white mist. ![]() There's some filler, as the characters go missing and looking for each other, but it never gets boring, thanks to the structure which keeps the reader on the edge: every scene, no matter how meek and mild and mundane, might very well lead to a sudden explosion of blood and horror. After finding the strange arm frozen and dormant in a river, Mark the MEP unwisely takes it to Paris, where it wakes up and begins its killing spree, until the required page length (a slim 156 pages) is reached and the arm is restrained once again. ![]() This is also as much plot as there is, since not much more is required. To Halkin's credit he's pretty good at it, too. The victims are all described in some detail, nudging the reader towards a calculated emotional reaction: these aren't just names in a book who are killed, they are characters made of flesh and blood, tourists and grocers and drunks, and so on, all boiled down to their essential traits and a few quirks in a couple of paragraphs. Also the arm can jump without any hind legs or anything, but whatevs.Īlthough the threat here is an occult item slash body part, The Unholy, a Hamlyn original, very much belongs in the James Herbert school of "when animals attack" horror. Basically an old occult relic discovered in a cave beneath a remote chapel, the arm's modus operandi is to sever the intended victim's own arm at the elbow and then to magically attach itself in its place, after which the arm also gains control of the rest of the body, mostly making the host laugh hysterically. There's an unstoppable homicidal arm loose on the streets of Paris and only a British member of the European Parliament can save the day.
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