Dir. Stephen Hopkins, US, 2007, 96 mins
Cast: Hilary Swank, David Morrisey, Idris Elba, Stephen Rea, Annasophia Robb
Review by Tim Waltho
What is it with the American horror film's obsession with the Deep South? The Reaping is yet another scare-flick set in the backwaters of the Southern Dixie States – which makes you wonder what we'd all be watching if the Confederates had won the civil war.
Way out in the Louisiana Bayou, Haven (ironic at best), is your regular bible-lovin', gun-totin', Hicksville; a little town of staunch faith and Christian values. But something weird is happening there, something ungodly; a young girl, believed to be the devil incarnate, has killed her brother and turned two miles of Louisiana Bayou into blood.
Fearing an escalation of plagues, bible style, hunky Haven widower Doug (Morrisey) – struggling with his Louisiana accent – returns to civilisation to find an angel. Katherine Winter (Swank), is who you call when there's something weird in your neighbourhood; a university lecturer, and ex-minister, she is the world's leading de-bunker of religious miracles. Two years ago Katherine lost her faith after her husband and daughter were murdered in Sudan, and has become uber-efficient and strongly atheist. With a little persuasion from Doug, Katherine, and her overly-religious sidekick Ben (Will he die? Won't he die? Elba), jump into a 4x4, and head deep into the Louisiana sticks.
Screenwriters Carey and Chad Hayes, steal from such pant-wetting classics as The Omen, Rosemary's Baby, and The Exorcist. But The Reaping fails to surpass or even equal its far-superior predecessors, because it simply isn't scary enough.
Okay, so there are a few scenes that‘ll scare the bejesus out of you, but they mostly rely on obvious loud noise, scary-face-in-mirror tactics, and the horror isn't sustained. The tension, which should be as tight as Gordon Brown's purse strings, lets up all too easily as each plague passes, and the inhabitants of Haven go right back to their everyday hick lives. This gives The Reaping the staccato feel of a collection of set pieces, hurriedly cobbled together with slower scenes. This slow/fast/slow pattern soon gets monotonous, and it's only right at the end of the film that it finally gets moving.
As Katherine, Swank gives some weight to the lead role, and her on-screen chemistry with best friend and partner in crime Ben (Elba) works well, but her character is burdened with a bizarre sacrifice, loss of faith back-story, which feels like it has been crow-barred in to fit the rest of the film.
The Reaping also fails to make best use of its young star. The child-demon in question is Loren McConnell (Robb): think Damien, but more feral, and elfin. Loren isn't on screen much till late on, creeping into view and running away immediately, or just staring feverishly. It isn't till the final scenes that she speaks, telling Katherine the secret that could have made this whole film mercifully shorter had she just told her in the first place.
The plague scenes themselves vary in effectiveness; the river of blood, from the first plague, looks great on screen, with the murky red contrasting beautifully against the lush green swampland. And the plague of locusts is the film's finest moment. Other scenes look lame in comparison; the flies only seem to cover one man's barbecue – more of a nuisance than a plague – and we had more hail in Britain in a couple of minutes this winter than Haven does in its seventh plague.
There are the requisite twists and turns as the film develops, which all fall into place adequately, though by that time you might not care because everything's so contrived. It's just disappointing that the films central themes of loss and redemption get buried so deeply beneath the clumsy storyline
Overall The Reaping plays like a paint-by-numbers horror, replete with backwater hicks, and child-demons, that feels more like sacrilege than redemption.
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