I have never actually thought about what a christian horror movie produced and shown on the Lifetime Network would look like. Now I know… and cannot forget.
Sam, a one time pastor and current gunsmith, lost his wife, and his faith. Now his sister-in-law, Laura has come to town and is staying at his house. Apparently years ago a “dark force” came to Sam and his friend Charlie and attempted to possess them. Luckily Sam’s father, a pastor himself, was there and saved the boys. Now years later the dark force has come back.
Laura is a free spirit and doesn’t believe in God but she believes that spirits do exist. The first night she is at Sam’s house something contacts her. She is soon seduced into thinking that the spirit can give her what she wants, some one to love her, and gives herself to the entity. Laura then tries to do a bit of seducing herself and manages to get Sam into bed with her. All the while Charlie is telling Sam that something is evil at their house and he needs help, in the form of his father, to exorcise the evil. Sam doesn’t listen until one night Laura is “taken” by the evil spirit. Then he turns to his father and God for help.
When I first started this movie I had no idea what I was getting into. It felt a little melodramatic but I figured it was just bad writing and worse acting. Turns out that this movie was written, directed, and produced as basically christian propaganda. My first clue to this was a scene where Sam was explaining that some spirits are bad, and some are good. Laura asks how he can tell the difference between the two and Sam simply answers; “Jesus”. At first this kind of put me off, then I began to actually respect the director for doing something different. It’s not a movie like “Left Behind” or “Fire Proof” where they shove the Christianity down your throat, though it is there. The Familiar also breaks the mold of what you would envision a religious movie would be. For that, I respect the film and why it was made.
Having said all that the movie is still crap, as far as a motion picture goes. The actor Bryan Massey that plays Sam flies off the handle faster than something I can’t think of to compare it to. He is supposed to be a “drunk” but aside from drinking from bottles of liquor all the time, he seems pretty sober. There isn’t a single thing scary in this movie what so ever. Given it’s roots in Christianity it’s easy to see why there were no nude scenes, or scenes of any real violence. I was a good fifty plus minutes in before anything other than bad exposition happened.
If you approach the movie knowing that it was basically made to scare christian men into staying faithful (in all uses of the term) I guess it’s decent. However, if you are going to label yourself as a horror movie, you might want to actually have some horrific things happen in it. That means something other than a woman lying in a strange circle of rocks yelling about how you are an adulterer.
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