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by Thomas M. Sipos,
managing editor [March 2, 2021]
[HollywoodInvestigator.com]
Four
young women drive off to rural England for a holiday. They pick up
a hitchhiker, who tells them about an upcoming pagan festival
nearby. He suggests it will be a wild party of a time.
The women receive a warm welcome at the festival. The pagans seem
to be your usual bunch of New Agey nature worshipers. They have
robes, and torches, and paint colorful glyphs on people's faces.
The centerpiece of the event is a wooden effigy of the goddess
Mabel, complete with antlers. It's all very Wicker Man.
The pagan priest, Father Saxon (Ian Champion), tells everyone to
write their fears on a piece of paper and toss it into the fire,
so that the goddess Mabel will take away your fears. At that point
I thought, no girls, don't do it. Don't tell this Mabel deity your
fears. She'll use that against you.
I was right. A renegade pagan, Mrs. March (Emma Spurgin Hussey)
later tells the women that they were the sacrificial
offering to Mabel. Now Mabel will claim them, one by one, by
attacking them through their fears.
That's an old horror trope. The monster who uses your fears
against you. It was the conceit behind
The Fear series, among others. So I suppose
Sacrilege can be described as
The Wicker Man meet
The Fear.
Sacrilege is an okay horror film. Competent, but
unexceptional. Diverting, but unoriginal. It's like so many
films that came before. You have a group of horny young friends in
an isolated setting. There's the usual pot smoking, drinking, and
bickering. Some soft core lesbian sex. Strange local townsfolk
with a secret. A creepy handyman. No cell phone signal. And some
gory deaths.
These largely interchangeable women are attacked by their fears.
One fears dogs. Another, bugs. The third woman fears ... I dunno,
disease and old age? And the fourth is terrified of her stalker ex-boyfriend. All succumb to their
fears and either die or are grievously injured. Except for the Last
Girl, who overcomes her fear and survives intact.
On the plus side, the gore effects are pretty good. The death in
the greenhouse is startling and well-staged. Sound and
cinematography are polished. The production design (including the
neo-pagan elements) is decent.
The acting is middlebrow. Not amateurish, but not outstanding.
Journeyman professionals doing their jobs, some better than
others,
On the down side, the body count is low. Indeed, the entire
film is low on content. It's a short feature, about 74
minutes not including credits. And it feels short. The
action was just revving up, events building toward a Big
Confrontation ... and then the film ends. Suddenly and without
resolution.
Sacrilege feels empty and unfinished.
Apart from the film's abrupt ending, the pagan cult is thinly
drawn. We only see the cult once at the ceremony, then a final,
anti-climactic glimpse at film's end. We never learn anything about their
theology. Ian Champion's Father Saxon is charismatic, but has
little screen time.
For these reasons,
Sacrilege is no
Wicker Man. Christopher Lee was a
powerful presence throughout
The Wicker Man, his theology detailed and rooted in history.
By contrast, Father Saxon remains a bland enigma. And who is this
goddess Mabel?
Sacrilege has a theme. A trite theme, because it's so
commonplace in films about fear. The lesson is: You must confront
your fears and so learn not to be afraid. Once your realize that
your fears are not real, that it's all in your head, the fears
will disappear and you will be safe.
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