Deliver Us

This written by a pair Kunz, and it shows. Lee and Kane Kunz to be precise.

This was right up my street, I thought. Immaculate conceptions, warrior priests and nuns on the run, what's not to like? Well, apparently, quite a lot.

This movie doesn't know what it wants to be. An arthouse drama, action thriller, horror?

There is a little too much messing around in a church then giving birth on a train (because yeah, that happens) with no blood, afterbirth, washing or cord cutting. Then a forest.

The dreams were good and quite spooky in parts, the acting adequate, the cinematography good but with poor direction.

I don't know what happened here. The first twenty minutes of this movie had me asking myself how I'd never heard of it, much less how it was not receiving an absurd amount of praise in the horror movie community. It was awesome.

And then the rest of the movie happened. The middle was so boring, and almost as if it was written by a totally different person. The ending livened things up a bit but not nearly enough to rekindle the atmosphere and engrossing nature of the beginning.

I give it a 5 because it wasn't awful. I'll probably never watch it again. Had the same passion been put into the entirity of the movie that was clearly placed into the beginning... I probably would have placed it into my top 10 in horror.

I would say this movie was quite well made cinematically. The picture is crisp and beautiful, the colors nicely match the atmosphere and empower it. Unfortunately, crisp picture is not enough to make a good movie, it lacks in other departments.

First of all, even though characters are stylistically solid, their visuals match their identities, the bad guy looks bad, the lead actresses look stunning, the protagonist looks humble, etc. Still, they are lacking any kind of good background, they are not explored well enough to introduce us to feel for them.

The religion theme chosen is just used together with the most basic plot you can come around. It seems like all the story boxes are checked, but those boxes are for the most straight-forward, basic movie, it's not original in any way. And lack of character development does not go well with that.

The horror part is weak. Which is sad, because aside from the good plot, this is also another very important thing for me in a horror movie. There are some scenes of gore, some soft screamers involved, but I would say that overall, its far on mild side for a horror. Unless, maybe, if you are a very religious person, otherwise I don't see how any part of this movie might actually frighten you.

Last thing, I guess, to which all of the other things mentioned contribute, is the overall sense of sterility of the movie. It looks beautiful as I mentioned, yet at the same time it's so clean, crisp, it feels ice cold. It seems just unnatural for a horror movie. Probably scenes just lack in small details that could add to any natural environments. This also applies to characters, which are all so clean to fit the narrative and picture, but it does look unnatural. Once again, they check all the boxes, and that's beautiful, but they fail to display any depth and any originality within it.

I believe, you would best enjoy such movie on a big screen, ideally in a theater of course where you'd be able to catch all the beautiful sides of it.

Clearly it is made by artists who done their job well. Yet I just want to take this moment to mention how important a good writer's job is. As this movie is a good example.

So, there is a huge difference between a regular artist and a good writer. Artists tend to reproduce the already known thing in their own new perspective (which might be beautiful), yet still is much easier to do in comparison with what a great writer should do - come up with a totally new and unseen thing, while making it seem real and plausible all the way through.

After you have a cold and brutal opening scene that looks really promising I was really interested to see where this movie is going. But a couple of minutes into the story and our main characters are leaving the remote monastery where the movie begins and after that the movie turns really slow and the only horror aspects consists of weird dreams and visions. The whole middle part of the movie was really slow and not particularly interesting.

I really enjoyed the beginning because it was scary, tense and had a great atmosphere and I genuinely enjoy movies with a snowy setting. But that whole second act was just awful to be honest. There are some pacing issues and the movie really loses its momentum after the promising start.

Then towards the third act the movie picks up the momentum again but still the payoff wasn't enough for it to make it a great horror movie.

It is stylish and really well shot and I think this movie could have been a lot better. [5,0/10]

The synopsis for this 2023 horror movie "Deliver Us" sounded interesting, and with it being a horror movie that I hadn't already seen, nor actually heard about when I stumbled upon it here in 2024, then of course I opted to sit down and watch it.

The storyline and script, from writers Lee Roy Kunz and Kane Kunz, was okay and watchable. However, the movie is rather monotonous and slow paced, and the narrative is definitely suffering from that. While the storyline is interesting, then directors Cru Ennis and Lee Roy Kunz were simply taking too long to take the story nowhere.

"Deliver Us" is somewhat of a difficult movie to sit through, given the fact that there isn't really a whole lot happening. And I must admit that I was close to giving up on finish watching it, just short of making it halfway through. But I opted to stick with it, hoping that directors Cru Ennis and Lee Roy Kunz would step up and bring a bit more to the table.

However, that just never happened and "Deliver Us" was ultimately an insanely slow paced and uneventful movie. And as for it being a horror movie, well, don't get your hopes up.

Of the entire cast ensemble in the movie, then I was only familiar with actor Thomas Kretschmann, and he was not even in a leading role. However, it should be said that the acting performances from the actors and actresses in the movie were actually quite fair, despite the fact that the script and storyline was so very mundane.

"Deliver Us" was a swing and a miss of a movie in terms of entertaining me. And this is most definitely not a movie that I will ever return to watch a second time. Nor is it a movie that I would recommend for the average horror fan to rush out and get to watch. If you are interested in religious storylines, then you might get a kick out of watching "Deliver Us", but for a casual viewer then the movie just didn't cut it.

This slow burn of a movie just didn't really tickle me in any of the right places.

My rating of "Deliver Us" lands on a very generous three out of ten stars.