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Review

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This review may contain spoilers.

"The Unholy" (2021) directed by Evan Spiliotopoulos (Quite a last name there isn't it?) is unfortunately a certain and absolute dud in my books. It's not completely incompetent or atrociously bad but it's just really underwhelming and not worth your time.

Gerry Fenn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is a sleazy reporter with a bad reputation due to faking stories in the past. He goes to an extremely religious town and encounters a deaf girl named Alice (Cricket Brown) who miraculously gains the ability to hear clearly and speak expertly instantaneously. Alice claims to communicate with Mary, mother of Jesus, through a sacred tree, and she is able to perform miracles on others which spawns a huge movement devoted to Alice & Mary. This sacred tree turns out to really be an unholy place where a sacrificial ritual was performed on the Bride of Satan Mary Elnor, who has now been released due to Gerry destroying the totem doll thing at the beginning of the film which contained her soul, and now the evil Mary has gained power because she has been masquerading as the Virgin Mary and everyone is chanting and believing in her more than ever before.

The Unholy unfortunately did not leave any lasting impressions on me and I would not recommend it. I actually like "The Nun" (2018) more than this one, and that one isn't very good as it is. A really funny element to this plot is the fact that it revolves around the fact that there is both a good and evil Mary, but this is actually not true by bible standards at all. I am not a religious person but I find these hyper religious films to be better and easier to take seriously when they don't create additional fiction elements as religion itself is already borderline fiction as it is, but I could take it seriously and respect it more if was portraying real things that religious people actually believe in.

Mary having the same name as other Mary felt like the "Martha Wayne" situation from "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" (2016), except I actually like the Martha Wayne thing much more than this. Towards the end of the film both Gerry & Alice proclaim that Mary is not real repeatedly in an effort to convince others to stop powering her, but being the literal person that I am, I would like to point out that Mary is actually real (as a concept / religious belief at the very least) and they should have been saying something like "Mary is evil" or "Mary is real but we accidentally empowered a demon with the same name and we were conned, sorry about that." Yes that may sound dumb coming out of their mouths but that is reality and I didn't make this story. The last thing I would like to criticize is how utterly weak the character of Gerry is, he is just a disposable plot device that I could care less about despite me liking Jeffrey Dean Morgan a lot.

The Unholy feels like it was a film that was made 10 plus years ago. Really poor CGI, non existent characters, and a nonsensical plot even by supernatural religious standards; but I don't give it an extremely low score mostly because it has a beginning, middle, and end, and it's not entirely incompetent / unenjoyable.

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