For those of you who aren’t already familiar, “tinfoil hats” are about what they sound like: hats made from aluminum foil. While they’re fairly interesting as a fashion choice, they have a much more benevolent purpose in the conspiracy theorist circles–namely, to block harmful mind control rays transmitted by the government from reaching your brain and messing with it in any of a hundred possible ways.
Wait! Don’t stop reading! I SWEAR this is a movie review!
Okay, now that you’re back, I know I’m on thin ice, so I’ll make this quick. Unholy is a movie that’s going to leave you wanting a tinfoil hat, whether or not they actually work. Basically, Unholy places Adrienne Barbeau, horror movie legend, in the unenviable position of watching her daughter commit suicide in the first ten minutes of the film. From there, she will piece together the shocking events that led to her daughter shoving a shotgun muzzle under her chin and opening fire. What she’s going to find, however, will involve Nazi superscience, malfeasance on the part of the United States government, the Unholy (that’s the point of that title!) trinity of scientific endeavor (invisibility, time travel and mind control) and what role she, her daughter and her son will play in the development of same.
I know–by now, you’re a little freaked out. You’ve seen JFK. You’ve maybe seen Fire In The Sky. You know the government isn’t always on the up-and-up with its citizenry. So it’s definitely a possibility (a pretty weak one, but still, a total possibility) that your government could right now be developing some kind of random whatsit that’ll lead to families at each other’s throats and mothers having to watch their own children forcibly inject buckshot into their own heads.
Scary? Absolutely.
And Unholy will take full advantage of this scariness and ratchet it clear through the roof, by showing us in an almost loving detail how bad things can get. I confess that even I was freaked out by this, and following the succession of one strange event to the other only managed to leave me steadily more freaked out with each passing event. By the time we saw the ending, which manages to make the film into a perfect circle (it’s that whole time travel thing–don’t ask too many questions or I’ll wind up spoilering), I was reaching for the Reynolds Wrap and looking for a place under the bed to hide.
The sheer plausibility of the events before you, coupled with an incredible detail backed up by a serious cast (say what you will, folks, Adrienne Barbeau was, is, and always will be an AMAZING actress) makes Unholy a screaming nightmare of terror from which you will not easily awaken, even with the rolling of the final credits.
If you have even the slightest inclination toward paranoia, I really recommend you stay away from this sucker. It’s EXTREMELY potent stuff, and might have you putting everything you’ve got into canned food and shotguns. But if you’re okay with tales of government chicanery and sheer science lunacy, then you will love this terrifying and tautly-paced romp.
