Beulah Bram
A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.
GL84
Following their sons' birth, a family soon becomes concerned about him as he grows to adulthood when a series of strange events lead them to believe that something is wrong with him and must race to stop the dark forces protecting the deadly secret lurking within him.This was quite a surprisingly enjoyable effort. A lot of the film's positives come from the rather strong and striking attempt to utilize the Gothic atmosphere in order to help its suspenseful nature. This starts off the first half of this one incredibly well with the opening scenes in the underground cave where the conspiring forces gather together to engage in the ritualistic ceremony to bring the devil to them where the rocky cave and demonic structure with the flowing river out of it makes for quite the fun setting. These carry on into the rest of the first half as they continually appear around them whether by appearing to ward off the attempt to smother him in his bedroom or the attack in the cemetery which are also quite fun. This does get dropped later on, but there's also the fact that this one manages quite nicely to follow along the plot line from the original film and manages to incorporate them into the events here which gives this one some rather enjoyable scenes following on from these elements. The way in which it switches over the party death is quite nice as the scene is suspenseful anyway and brings about a nice shock with the twist in the death of the guilty party as well as carry out the big plot line from the later effort of spending a vast amount of the time alternating between keeping his identity a secret and using his powers to get back at his enemies. Although the action does slow down slightly, it has enough going on with his freak-outs and changes to stay interesting as it heads into the finale which is a fine return to the Gothic fun with the different forces coming together to include the wild resurrection of the father at the graveyard during the funeral to battles with his true self and bringing the romance angle full-circle with the tender revelation at the end meshing nicely with the Gothic action and locations. While there's a lot of great stuff in this one, there are a few elements that hold it back. One of the biggest issues is the fact that there's just not a whole lot of interest coming from the romance angle that pops up in the middle of the film. Not only is the whole affair quite clichéd and not really all that interesting by playing into ever-familiar themes of so many films that try to play off following his heart versus his preordained destiny, but the melodramatic nature of the scenes drains the pacing down to an absolute crawl which doesn't really impress all that much. Featuring too many scenes of them engaging in deep discussions with their family members about what's going to happen to them but there's the endless motorbike race that just makes for an exceptionally dull effort with these types of scenes holding back the horror aspects to a large degree throughout here. The other flaw here is the film's rather cheap-looking special effects, which are a notch above cringe-worthy although the scenes of the infant version sporting wolfman-like hair and devil horns obviously glued to his face in patches makes for a hilarious sight rather than a chilling one. These here are what hold this one back.Rated Unrated/R: Violence, Language, innocent child nudity and scenes of children-in-jeopardy.
