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The Unholy 2021 ★★
In The Unholy, Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays the type of down on his luck reporter that, up until a few years ago, would have Fox News go: When can you start?
He ends up in a small town named Banfield where a little girl named Alice (sweet Alice) is supposedly healed by the virgin Mary. He lets go of his initial scoff and starts investigating.
And then we get the same old unimaginative tripe we've seen before. Demons, a change of heart, false hope, a dramatic finish, every so often we get a reminder that a demon is involved... There is nothing wrong with religious horror as such, but when you're doing a religious horror... Wether you want to or not, you're competing with classics like The Omen and The Exorcist. So by default, you've set the bar pretty fucking high for yourself. Then you have to do better than a cookie cutter story or a cast that does not grab you. Not saying that the girl playing Alice did a terrible job, but it does not help that seeing makes you think of other horror movies or wonder what Imogen Poots or Maika Monroe could have done with this character.
It's not all bad. We sometimes get some nice imagery, Jeffrey Dean Morgan does what he can with the material he's given and I can see how the character arc he goes through attracted him.
It's just that the whole thing did not do much for me.
Carnosaur 2 1995 ★★★★
If anything, this came right on time. Just the type of stupid I needed to unwind after a stressful day.
Seeing Miguel Nunez made me smile. I used to love Tour of duty, so I was already familiar with him (kinda, sorta) but seeing him in this type of cheesy bullshit just warms the cockles of my heart. Especially with how he hams it up in this one. Pity he did not get more screentime in this one.
The story is tremendous B-movie schlock with a rag tag group of mercenaries, a last minute escape and, of course, nuclear weapons popping up somewhere.
And this gang? They are something. Cliff Deyoung plays a major with as much authority as Frank Burns in a Schwarzenegger-movie.
Burns: I'm giving you an order.
Hawkeye: Please do, Frank. We've never ignored one of those.
The rest of the group? There's Miguel Nunez, a bearded dude that looks like an attitude era-wrestler, a woman who seems to be channeling a different personality in pretty much every scene she is in, a macho who looks like he should be in a hair metal band. And the kid they find reminded me of Randy Quaid's son in Independence Day.
Roger Corman is going tease on us here, keeping the gore until the very end. The result of that is that the opening carnage looks like a fight scene from either the A-Team or a Bud Spencer movie. And it was glorious.
Have you sat through all of this and not seen this gem yet? Then haul ass over to the joetoebs and do so. You know you want to.
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