The Coven

This movie is not very good. The 'menacing' cult just stands around holding torches. The main couple is annoying. The story is really questionable, and I'm pretty forgiving. The final five minutes is kinda ok, but it's not worth it. This movie should've been titled 'The Long 90 Minutes'

"The Coven" or also known as "The Long Night" is a movie with a predictable and sometimes silly script, but it has a couple of interesting moments within its cult and satanism theme. The great achievement of the film is its cinematography which is atmospheric and offers some gloomy and other very beautiful visuals, making the most of its filming locations. The performances of Scout Taylor-Compton, Nolan Gerard Funk and Jeff Fahey are decent without being outstanding. The soundtrack is an interesting point, sometimes it is good but in some scenes it does not fit with the image that is shown, resulting out of place. A soulless and boring movie at times, but not as bad as its reputation says.

Let's get right to it - this is a bad movie. The story is nearly nonexistent and what is there is the most generic, uninspired cult plot imaginable. The two leads would have made fine side characters in a slasher who get killed off, but they just aren't the type of character who can lead a movie like this. The male lead provides a solid portrayal of the obnoxious rich jockbro archetype, whose purpose is to simply be fodder...but that type of character has no knowledge or skills to lend to this type of story and feels awkward when left in for too long. Scout Taylor-Compton basically reprises her role as Angel Meyers from Rob Zombie's Halloween - a character who is the child of an unspeakable evil that spends most of her time screaming hysterically. However, in The Long Night she is just a forgettable shell of a character and is barely given anything to say or do, despite being the lead. Nothing of any significance happens so I'll leave it at that in terms of the "story".

That said, there were a lot of genuinely great visuals here. The cult looked excellent and there were a number of appealing shots of the cult doing cult things, such as igniting the giant unicursal hexagram symbol on the lawn. This movie seems to take significant influence from 70s cult/psychedelic horror, and the atmosphere was well done. Even though it lacked a lot of aspects necessary for a good movie, many scenes had a strong music video feel and would have worked extremely well in that context. As a movie it completely fails, but if distilled it could have made a great short folk horror film based exclusively around the strength of the visuals & aesthetic without needing to try to incorporate a story.

I pretty much agree with 'Wormsoftheerth's review. He/She hit it right on, so I'll point you to that review for more details.

I will say that with the genuinely powerful visuals and soundtrack, at the beginning I was really hoping for a lot here, but as others have said, there just simply was not enough 'Story', and I honestly feel that they really lost any focus at all by the last 30 minutes. I think the IDEA itself is fine, although it has certainly been done many times before, but especially when you start a movie off this strongly, you absolutely HAVE to be able to ratchet up the tension as you go along, building to an effective ending, and unfortunately that just does not happen here.

I will say that the director is most definitely very strongly influenced by Stanley Kubrick, no doubt about it, even right down to the scene titles. Long, epic panning camera movements. Long, moody shots. Even some of the Space/Embryo imagery towards the end. Again, TONS of atmosphere which I really like and I feel is one of the most important elements in a good Horror film. But, you HAVE to build to something, and this just kind of whimpers out. Be sure to check out the review I mention above because I very much agree with pretty much all of this person's observations.

I think that if the filmmakers had just spent as much time on an effective development of the actual story as they did on the look, mood, and atmosphere, they really would have had something here. And, it is always great to see the excellent Jeff Fahey! Although I would guess that it probably didn't take much more than a day to shoot his scenes.

So, ultimately, especially after about the first hour, pretty disappointing. I gave it a '5' which was higher than the current 3.x that ones have rated it. Mainly giving a little extra credit for the fantastic look, sound, and feel of the movie. I would suggest that if you happen to like really atmospheric, moody Folk/Horror movies, just watch the first half, and when it begins to falter, go do something else 😁

Knew this was going to be bad as soon as they showed the painfully long silent car ride where they superimposed shots over the top of each other for no reason whatsoever. Reminded me of the unnecessarily long transition scenes in Birdemic that served no purpose whatsoever.

Gave it two stars for a good title cover.