Review: The Unholy

Director: Evan Spiliotopoulos

Screenplay: Evan Spiliotopoulos

Year: 2021

A deaf-mute young woman is visited by the Virgin Mary, who restores her hearing and voice and allows her to heal the sick. The young woman becomes a small celebrity when people begin to follow her to witness her miracles. But are these miracles really virgin’s making, or is there something more sinister behind it?

"The Unholy" is one of the films that drew a lot of attention as it was one of the first films to venture back to theaters, in its case, also taking advantage of the Easter holiday to give more relevance to its theme. For my part, since seeing it advertised, I was delaying watching this movie because I already suspected that it was just another mediocre movie trying to get money from a deceptive promotional campaign. What took me by surprise is that it is worse than I expected.

For much of its development, we follow the journalist Gerry Fenn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan; “The Walking Dead”), who, after almost running over Alice (Cricket Brown), realizes what is happening around her. With the idea of ​​turning his career as a journalist around, Gerry stays in the small town to document Alice's miracle and the miracles she later performs. However, his character is too self-centered and flat to be interested in him.

Not only does this happen with the protagonist, but all the characters suffer from the same problem, and it is not the fault of the cast, who do a good job with the material they have at hand. The main problem lies in the script by fellow director Evan Spiliotopoulos ("Beauty and The Beast"), which not only brings uninteresting characters, but the whole plot suffers from the same evil. Apart from that, the dialogue and the plot’s structure are extremely linear and predictable, to the point that more than evoke fear, they are embarrassing.

One of the hooks of this movie is that horror legend Sam Raimi produced it, so you could expect to see some of his influence. Well, let's say that his influence is limited to the use of CGI to give life to his antagonist and little else. "The Unholy" is nothing more than a festival of jump scares that each one is less effective than the previous and its 'monster' is nothing more than a set of clichés of different popular creatures in modern horror cinema, completely lacking in originality and worse still, of effectiveness.

I already had my doubts during the promotion of "The Unholy", so I delayed the moment of seeing it as much as I could. Not only was I right in my suspicion, but the movie turned out far worse than expected. It is nothing more than a collection of jump scares without originality or effectiveness accompanied by a horrendous CGI and a shameful script. It will be hard to dethrone as the worst horror movie to hit theaters this year.