Shadow of God

If you like Raiders of the Lost Ark, you're gonna love this movie. When the Ark, I mean sarcophagus, scene arrives and the light starts emanating from it, imagine John Williams' score from Raiders playing in your head. It'll be the only joy you'll experience from this looney tunes of a movie.

If next week you come across this movie, don't be surprised if you start watching it again because you couldn't remember you saw it a week ago. It's that memorable.

Also, for most of the movie after about the 1/2 hour mark, imagine you're watching a Monty Python episode. The movie will make waaaaay better sense.

After a failed exorcism, a priest returns to his hometown to reflect on his position only to find his thought-dead father returned to him, setting off a chain of events that point to a special entity running through the town and must rely on his spirituality and faith to save everyone he holds dear.

This was an overall decent if decidedly generic feature. Among the more enjoyable factors present here is the wholly intriguing setup that admittedly tries to do something clever and unique with the possession genre. Rather than go for the traditional route of a conflicted priest brought back to the side of righteousness due to a prolonged battle with a demonic entity that tries testing him in the body of a young girl, this one goes for more a small town corrupted by an evil entity and forcing him to deal with it. The backstory involving the cult's activities taking over the area only to be stopped by the authorities starting his quest with the church and using that as a basis for spreading the malicious activity in the present by allowing it to come off with the mindset of the figures coming back for revenge. That sets up some of the more intriguing, if ultimately problematic, work here, where the attempts to save the town manage to bring about some underwhelming work involving the attempts at exorcizing the demonic spirits within the victims. In concept, this work should be quite intriguing as it soon becomes obvious that there might not be demonic forces holding the spirit hostage but holy figures that are involved for different reasons than would initially be suspected. However, the film never goes through with this idea, as the idea is brought up early as the reasoning behind the father's return, yet it never does anything interesting with the idea other than doing something different for an exorcism scene beyond throwing dollops of holy water at a contorting woman yelling in demon-accented Latin. The visuals in the scenes look intriguing enough with the spectral lights and stuff going on, but it's more about how different these are than anything else. By the time it gets to the finale and the actual purpose of the exorcism is brought into play, this one ends up falling apart rather badly. The rushed nature and generally unprepared story make a big impression on this part of the film as the few bits given to the background of the main characters are generally uninteresting and not even pertinent to what's going on as there's a bizarre abduction and holding hostage aspect that doesn't make much sense why the figure in particular would be involved. That renders a lot of the race to save feel redundant and lacking in tension as there's no real stakes here with no information on what's going on, from the background of the characters to the purpose of the cult and what they're working towards with everything just given a surface-level gloss that never goes deeper into these aspects. The supernatural action and explosions are fun enough, but they're not nearly enough to save this one.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.

What in the world did I just watch? Such a unique spin on the tired "demonic possession" subgenre, but executed so, SO poorly. Bad acting, poor dialogue, and special effects that make Sharknado look like Avatar. I have three professional critics that I respect and one recommended this highly. How highly? 85/100. I want a little of what he smoked before screening this low budget, aim for the stars and hit the sidewalk mess. Once again, Shudder had picked up a garbage indie on the cheap, slapped "Shudder Original" on it, and got by another week without having to invest in decent programming. Well played Shudder, for now.

I have very low expectations for possession films, as they always deal with the same formulaic garbage. Catholic priest, contortionists, double voices, black eyes, body markings, being tied up to the bed.... It's all so tired and worn out. Every time a new film in the sub genre comes out I have a small glimmer of hope that it might break the mold and do something different or even remotely unique and they all fail miserably, this one much worse than any in recent memory. It's so bad I didn't even want to finish it, but I did to write this honest review in hopes that no one else makes the same mistake I did in giving it a chance.

Nothing about this film is even slightly original, regardless of of how it might seem at first glance. It's the same formula, almost to the letter, and it's so stringent in following it that I wonder why people still continue to stick to such a tired and worn out convention for these films. It's almost like people make these movies and have a check list of all the "possession film" prerequisites that must be met, but when will someone say "ENOUGH!" And focus on one of the countless other religions and rites of exorcism found in the world? Catholicism is not the only religion that believes in demons, you know.

The acting is serviceable and actually pretty apt for the most part, except for the end with the overweight bald cult member that was absolutely atrocious in his method and ruined the decent track record the movie had. Whoever hired him failed in casting him and I hope they l learn their lesson for future films.

It's so frustrating to spend any amount of time watching a movie that gets worse as the movie progresses. Nothing about this movie was scary or even creepy, it was just stuff done by much better movies made by much more talented people. If it weren't for the acting, this movie would have been a certifiable failure in all respects, but I have to give props where it's due, and the cast did the best it could with the bird cage lining that was that script.

Don't watch this movie. It wasn't good, it wasn't any different from the countless other movies of its ilk and it really wasn't that entertaining. What it does is test your patience, make you check your watch, and pause the film to see how much is left of it every 10 minutes. I cannot recommend this movie for any reason, and I implore all of you to do anything else with your time than watch it.

This is just not a great movie to begin with, let alone a good exorcism movie. None of the characters really have any depth and the entire film just exists to posit the very unoriginal plot of "what if God were evil?" and it doesn't really even deliver on that too well. It's not overly long, so that's good, and some of the acting isn't bad at all, but the editing, terrible special effects, and predictably of the film definitely make this less than it could have been. I would only recommend this to veteran horror lovers who have seen their fair share of bad movies, because there might be a chance that they could appreciate some parts of this movie.