THE BELIEVERS
(Supernatural, Horror, Thriller, Mystery, 1987) (18) D: John Schlesinger W: Nicholas Conde, S : Marting Sheen, Helen Shaver and Robert Loggia. 1h 54m. USA
TAGLINE: Nothing can stop them, No one can help you, They know who you are.
A New York Psychiatrist finds that a voodoo cult which believes in child sacrifice, has a keen interest in his own son.
I’m not entirely sure how I ever missed this movie up until now! I adore everything about it. It goes from a shocking morning breakfast to Fulci style insect crawling out of the face gore! Obviously there is a little more going on..
Basically Cal (Martin Sheen)’s son is hot property to some voodoo cult, there are some mysterious child murders and apparent suicides of adults. After the shocking breakfast tragedy, Cal and his son move to New York where he then has to fight what he doesn’t know or understand to save his son from a “Brujeria” who needs his son to preform one of their rituals.
The film is exceptionally made and despite being long (not in my books) people have crucified it for being slow and padding things out, I suppose it’s just not for everyone but I felt that it kept to the story and kept that story flowing. A lot of Voodoo cinema deal with the history or the cult personalities etc, there is not deep history lesson or anything with leads the viewer though any lanes of belief, you really have to do all this hard work yourself.
The first passing of the wife is something that you could possibly see as happening but if the next scene went to spiders crawling gout of someone’s face then you would switch it off, but by the time your introduced to the workings of the cult, the mutilations the mental breaking down of a seasoned police officer, your taken in by the power of the magic.
If you can appreciate an older horror that can scare without the use of CGI then you might find this interesting.
Q : “Alright, I understand. You don’t have any reason to trust me yet. But you don’t have any reason to distrust me, do you?”
R: The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), Angel Heart (1987), Borderland (2007), Marked for Death (1990), Sugar Hill (1974)
7/10
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