MBunge 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.

Rabh17 This one will get reviews all over the map because it doesn't comfortably fit any mold. It's horror-- but not a splatterfest. It's equal part Suspense as well as Horror-- yet without the usual Hollywood screams and jerky camera. The feel of the movie is spare and lean with next to no special effects because I think you should listen and watch the faces of the characters.Forget that Brendan is a graduate of the Buffy universe. That's a red herring. He IS acting here. 'Camp' is a misreading of the tone of this story. Adrienne Barbeau is giving a rock solid performance-- so she must believe the script has something to say. We all know the sorry excuses where the actors plainly don't care anymore and are just waiting for the director to snap "Cut" and get their paychecks. This is Not the case, here.Forgive the fact that the bodies begin to fall with almost mondo-funny regularity. I don't think the intent was humorous-- but to keep you off balance. Think of it less of a Horror 'Movie' and more of a Horror 'Play' on a stage-- that decrepit whitewashed house. Then you might see it's really about paranoia, fear, and spiralling madness set in an isolated someplace, USA.And it is twisty. Time travel, Mind Control, secret experiments and Nazi's who may NOT be dead. . .yet.I say rent it and give it a try if you're in the mood for something a little cerebral. This would be a good choice for a Saturday Midnight sit down.

trancejeremy This sounded like a really interesting movie from the blurb. Nazis, occult , government conspiracies. I was expecting a low budget Nazi version of the DaVinci code or the Boys from Brazil or even Shockwaves. Instead you get something quite different, more psychological, more something like from David Lynch. That was actually a plus. But the way the story is told is just awful.Part of the trouble is the casting. Andrienne Barbeau's character starts off the moving being somewhat timid and afraid. She just doesn't do that well, even at her age, though she certainly tried. The actor cast as the son apparently thought this was a comedy. Most of the other actors also seemed to have thought this was a campy movie, or at least acted like it, rather than simply being quirky. The only one that I thought did really well was the daughter, Siri Baruc.Another big part is the pacing. It starts off very slowly. So slowly you might be tempted to turn it off. But then it gets compelling for a while when you get to the daughter's suicide and the aftermath. But shortly afterward, it all becomes a jumbled mess. Some of this was on purpose, but much of it was just needlessly confusing, monotonous, and poorly focused.The real problem, is it's simply not a pleasant movie to watch. It's slow, dull, none of the characters are likable. Overuse of imagery and sets. Some movies you see characters get tortured. In this, it's the viewer that does. It does have a few creepy moments, most notably the creepy Nazi paintings and the credits, but the rest of the movie is mostly just tiresome.

knifeintheeye Some movies dream big on a small budget and this is one of them. The small budget allotted to it, doesn't do it's story justice. It's not that the movie was badly made, it's that it could have been so much better.First off; the performances. Other then the son, everyone did a pretty good job. The neighbor who had a fascination for tomatoes was pretty cool, and was a nice bit of comic relief.The story. A bit too far reaching for the budget allotted. Within minutes we find out about the Unholy Trinity conducted by the Nazis during the war: invisibility, mind control and time travel. Without giving anything further away, the movie involves characters finding out about mind control, invisibility and time travel. By the way, stay tuned for the credits, the story continues in radio addresses throughout the end credits.The SFX. Not bad, but I can see them being done on the directors home PC using everyday over the counter technology--not that it's a bad thing.Honestly the best part of the movie were the three painting that were shown. I loved the style they were done in.In closing all I have to say is: Damn Nazis!