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Hump-Day Drive-By Review: The Reaping
Nov. 26th, 2014 11:36 amWord to your Moms (and anybody else who might be listening): The Reaping (2007, Stephen Hopkins dir.) is not a very good film. This is a movie based on theology so shaky it makes Stigmata look good, one whose main plot twist depends on its central character being completely unable to interpret what in hindsight seem really obvious clues, especially for somebody who was once and ordained minister of some sort.
Then again, it's also a movie in which an otherwise well-intentioned priest, Fr. Michael Costigan (Stephen Rea, looking immensely bewildered, like he rolled out of bed after a bender and found himself randomly teleported onto the set), gets what he thinks is a warning from God that something bad is going to happen to said main character, then ends up misinterpreting it so horribly that he advises her to kill the wrong person. In retrospect, I think this particular collect call probably comes from someplace down rather than up, but man, this is yet one more instance in which you want to grab the Almighty and yell: "Free will aside, PLEASE JUST FUCKING TELL PEOPLE WHAT TO DO, OKAY? Specifically. Explicitly. Because we're stupid."
Like most Hollywood religious horror films, The Reaping's main problem has to do with the fact that nobody involved with it has enough investment in the mythology to make it either resonant or internally logical. Which is a pity, because the general concept has some genuine appeal, making the product itself both weirdly enticing yet also baffling beyond belief (ha ha), very definitely schlock entertainment in the Salem vein.
We kick off with Katherine Winter (Hillary Swank, Oscar-winner), the aforementioned former minister, who now teaches at the University of Louisiana. On her off-hours, she investigates/debunks miracles, and claims to be 48 for 48: "48 so-called miracles, 48 scientific explanations." Assisting her in this quest is Ben (Idris Elba), her former TA, an ex-gangbanger turned battlefield Baptist convert--he goes along with Katherine because he's stumping for the other side, playing her platonic best friend/gentle Deity's Advocate.
One morning after class, Katherine and Ben receive a visit from high school science teacher Doug Blackwell (David Morrissey, which explains why I was watching this in the first place--that and it only cost me ten bucks on DVD), a post which elects him "town brainiac" for the little bayou village of Haven, LA, the "best-kept secret in the Bible Belt." Doug claims the river outside Haven has turned red following the death of a local boy and the disappearance of his little sister, and that he's afraid the girl will become a lynchable scapegoat for the panicked populace. "They think it's a plague, and maybe there're nine more on the way." Katherine's immediately interested, for professional and personal reasons: the girl is twelve, the age her own daughter would have been by now, if she hadn't been sacrificed in Africa to break a drought tribespeople blamed on Katherine and her fellow missionaries. So off they roll into the swamp.
Haven proves to be a tiny, beautiful, extremely religious town, the kind of place where they have signs set up outside the church which read: "Our Lord's a Gentle Lord, But Don't Push It!" "I hear you're not much of a bible-reader," the mayor tells Katherine, who replies: "Oh, I've read it..." "But you don't put much stock in it. (To Ben) Some people just don't want to go to heaven." Soon enough, they're out hip-wading through waters which run as blood, when frogs start falling from the sky. Then they go back to Doug's place--an honest-to-whatever plantation he's vainly trying to refurbish on a teacher's salary, left over from when the Blackwells were one of Haven's founding families--and start making barbecue, which quickly gets eaten by flies and maggots. Cue the death of livestock, lice, boils, locusts...
With every new plague, Fr. Costigan gets more and more convinced that Lauren McConnell (Annasophia Robb), the missing girl, may be a version of the antichrist created by a Satanic cult whose symbol is an upside-down sickle, people who routinely sacrifice their second-born children in order to reap a "harvest" of good luck along with an eventual avatar for the Devil. But like I said at the beginning, Costigan is horribly wrong, which makes first Ben and then Katherine horribly wrong. In fact, everybody in town is a Satanist, and Lauren is a sort of living saint, an "angel" God's sent to inflict the Biblical plagues on them...especially the last one, the Death of the First-born, which is all but guaranteed to wipe Haven off the map since--as Doug himself admits--they all come from "a long line of only children."
(By the way, did you know that the Death of the First-born apparently involved both levitation and spontaneous human combustion? Yup! That must've been some party.)
As usual, whenever I watch bad horror I start thinking about stuff I'm really not supposed to think about, like what's it like to be raised believing that when bad things happen, it's literally because God actually does hate you. At one point halfway through the action, all the lights in Doug's mansion go out so Katherine wanders outside and finds him talking to his wife's grave (she died of cancer right when they'd just started trying for kids, which might indeed have made the Almighty a tad peeved: "Felt sick, so we went to the doctor. Walked in thinkin' we were havin' a boy, and walked out..."); I turned the captions on and what he's saying as she approaches turns out to be: "...she seems like a good person. I think you'd like her." Thus confirming that his overall plan may indeed have been: "Okay, she's lost her faith so we'll trick her into killing a living saint, and while that's goin' on I can slip her a magic roofie and get her pregnant, 'cause we need another Blackwell heir, stat. And then maybe we'll date!"
As sovay pointed out to me in a subsequent email exchange, this spins things down a bit of a theological rabbit hole: if you can believe that Devil gave your beloved wife to you (and vice versa—it was a happy marriage, by all evidence) and God cruelly took her away, that's really not providing a lot of incentive to think about about changing sides. Better yet, though, if Doug did originally marry a girl from out of town, as I suspect--maybe somebody he met at university--how exactly would he have explained the religion he grew up with to her, if he ever did?
Doug: Well, honey, my grandaddy always used to say the only difference between us and Christians is that when WE pray for stuff, our Lord actually gives it to us.
Samantha: What did you ever pray for that Satan gave you? (He shrugs) Oh, no way. What, so I only fell in love with you because the devil made me do it?
Doug: That's what my grandaddy would say, not me. But hell, guess we'll never know now, right?
(There's also an interesting stained glass window in the Haven, LA church featuring four people tied to stakes and burning. From a distance, you might think they were in hell, but the closer you get, the more they start to look like they're being executed--they even seem to be dressed like Elizabethans. So were the Blackwells fleeing persecution for witchcraft when they came to Louisiana, and did they take on protective coloration in order to hide undetected in the burgeoning Bible Belt, then only reveal themselves after the three-hurricane punch which levelled Haven's original church? "Feeling screwed by God? We have an alternative, y'all.")
Aaaaanyhow: Katherine eventually wises up, in the absolute crunch of things, and manages to save Lauren from a Satanist mob; Doug is the last person to go up in flames, sucked heaven-ward only to explode and disintegrate along with every other only child in Haven, but that's only after he's stabbed Ben in the back and framed Lauren for the deed, depriving the movie of two sexy British dudes managing okay Southern accents at once. Katherine drives off with Lauren, only to realize she really must have had magical roofie sex with Doug after all, because she's now apparently pregnant with the Devil-avatar baby all this shit was designed to bring about. Can The Reaping 2 be far behind? (I guess so, given it's been almost ten years.)
So yeah, that's the story, and I don't know...maybe it'll end up in something. Twist it a bit more, it might do for a Lovecraftian piece, actually, though I'd have to shift it from the bayou to somewhere else. Australia? That'd be kind of hilarious. "There's this one place in New South Wales that ISN'T burnt out every summer, and we just can't quite figure out why." "Satanist cult?" "...I wouldn't've gone there myself, but sure."
Back to it.
Then again, it's also a movie in which an otherwise well-intentioned priest, Fr. Michael Costigan (Stephen Rea, looking immensely bewildered, like he rolled out of bed after a bender and found himself randomly teleported onto the set), gets what he thinks is a warning from God that something bad is going to happen to said main character, then ends up misinterpreting it so horribly that he advises her to kill the wrong person. In retrospect, I think this particular collect call probably comes from someplace down rather than up, but man, this is yet one more instance in which you want to grab the Almighty and yell: "Free will aside, PLEASE JUST FUCKING TELL PEOPLE WHAT TO DO, OKAY? Specifically. Explicitly. Because we're stupid."
Like most Hollywood religious horror films, The Reaping's main problem has to do with the fact that nobody involved with it has enough investment in the mythology to make it either resonant or internally logical. Which is a pity, because the general concept has some genuine appeal, making the product itself both weirdly enticing yet also baffling beyond belief (ha ha), very definitely schlock entertainment in the Salem vein.
We kick off with Katherine Winter (Hillary Swank, Oscar-winner), the aforementioned former minister, who now teaches at the University of Louisiana. On her off-hours, she investigates/debunks miracles, and claims to be 48 for 48: "48 so-called miracles, 48 scientific explanations." Assisting her in this quest is Ben (Idris Elba), her former TA, an ex-gangbanger turned battlefield Baptist convert--he goes along with Katherine because he's stumping for the other side, playing her platonic best friend/gentle Deity's Advocate.
One morning after class, Katherine and Ben receive a visit from high school science teacher Doug Blackwell (David Morrissey, which explains why I was watching this in the first place--that and it only cost me ten bucks on DVD), a post which elects him "town brainiac" for the little bayou village of Haven, LA, the "best-kept secret in the Bible Belt." Doug claims the river outside Haven has turned red following the death of a local boy and the disappearance of his little sister, and that he's afraid the girl will become a lynchable scapegoat for the panicked populace. "They think it's a plague, and maybe there're nine more on the way." Katherine's immediately interested, for professional and personal reasons: the girl is twelve, the age her own daughter would have been by now, if she hadn't been sacrificed in Africa to break a drought tribespeople blamed on Katherine and her fellow missionaries. So off they roll into the swamp.
Haven proves to be a tiny, beautiful, extremely religious town, the kind of place where they have signs set up outside the church which read: "Our Lord's a Gentle Lord, But Don't Push It!" "I hear you're not much of a bible-reader," the mayor tells Katherine, who replies: "Oh, I've read it..." "But you don't put much stock in it. (To Ben) Some people just don't want to go to heaven." Soon enough, they're out hip-wading through waters which run as blood, when frogs start falling from the sky. Then they go back to Doug's place--an honest-to-whatever plantation he's vainly trying to refurbish on a teacher's salary, left over from when the Blackwells were one of Haven's founding families--and start making barbecue, which quickly gets eaten by flies and maggots. Cue the death of livestock, lice, boils, locusts...
With every new plague, Fr. Costigan gets more and more convinced that Lauren McConnell (Annasophia Robb), the missing girl, may be a version of the antichrist created by a Satanic cult whose symbol is an upside-down sickle, people who routinely sacrifice their second-born children in order to reap a "harvest" of good luck along with an eventual avatar for the Devil. But like I said at the beginning, Costigan is horribly wrong, which makes first Ben and then Katherine horribly wrong. In fact, everybody in town is a Satanist, and Lauren is a sort of living saint, an "angel" God's sent to inflict the Biblical plagues on them...especially the last one, the Death of the First-born, which is all but guaranteed to wipe Haven off the map since--as Doug himself admits--they all come from "a long line of only children."
(By the way, did you know that the Death of the First-born apparently involved both levitation and spontaneous human combustion? Yup! That must've been some party.)
As usual, whenever I watch bad horror I start thinking about stuff I'm really not supposed to think about, like what's it like to be raised believing that when bad things happen, it's literally because God actually does hate you. At one point halfway through the action, all the lights in Doug's mansion go out so Katherine wanders outside and finds him talking to his wife's grave (she died of cancer right when they'd just started trying for kids, which might indeed have made the Almighty a tad peeved: "Felt sick, so we went to the doctor. Walked in thinkin' we were havin' a boy, and walked out..."); I turned the captions on and what he's saying as she approaches turns out to be: "...she seems like a good person. I think you'd like her." Thus confirming that his overall plan may indeed have been: "Okay, she's lost her faith so we'll trick her into killing a living saint, and while that's goin' on I can slip her a magic roofie and get her pregnant, 'cause we need another Blackwell heir, stat. And then maybe we'll date!"
As sovay pointed out to me in a subsequent email exchange, this spins things down a bit of a theological rabbit hole: if you can believe that Devil gave your beloved wife to you (and vice versa—it was a happy marriage, by all evidence) and God cruelly took her away, that's really not providing a lot of incentive to think about about changing sides. Better yet, though, if Doug did originally marry a girl from out of town, as I suspect--maybe somebody he met at university--how exactly would he have explained the religion he grew up with to her, if he ever did?
Doug: Well, honey, my grandaddy always used to say the only difference between us and Christians is that when WE pray for stuff, our Lord actually gives it to us.
Samantha: What did you ever pray for that Satan gave you? (He shrugs) Oh, no way. What, so I only fell in love with you because the devil made me do it?
Doug: That's what my grandaddy would say, not me. But hell, guess we'll never know now, right?
(There's also an interesting stained glass window in the Haven, LA church featuring four people tied to stakes and burning. From a distance, you might think they were in hell, but the closer you get, the more they start to look like they're being executed--they even seem to be dressed like Elizabethans. So were the Blackwells fleeing persecution for witchcraft when they came to Louisiana, and did they take on protective coloration in order to hide undetected in the burgeoning Bible Belt, then only reveal themselves after the three-hurricane punch which levelled Haven's original church? "Feeling screwed by God? We have an alternative, y'all.")
Aaaaanyhow: Katherine eventually wises up, in the absolute crunch of things, and manages to save Lauren from a Satanist mob; Doug is the last person to go up in flames, sucked heaven-ward only to explode and disintegrate along with every other only child in Haven, but that's only after he's stabbed Ben in the back and framed Lauren for the deed, depriving the movie of two sexy British dudes managing okay Southern accents at once. Katherine drives off with Lauren, only to realize she really must have had magical roofie sex with Doug after all, because she's now apparently pregnant with the Devil-avatar baby all this shit was designed to bring about. Can The Reaping 2 be far behind? (I guess so, given it's been almost ten years.)
So yeah, that's the story, and I don't know...maybe it'll end up in something. Twist it a bit more, it might do for a Lovecraftian piece, actually, though I'd have to shift it from the bayou to somewhere else. Australia? That'd be kind of hilarious. "There's this one place in New South Wales that ISN'T burnt out every summer, and we just can't quite figure out why." "Satanist cult?" "...I wouldn't've gone there myself, but sure."
Back to it.
