By Curt Schleier

It’s Halloween.  You’ve come back from trick or treating, and gone through all the candy.  You’re a clever trader and managed to corner the market on Three Musketeers bars, giving up only the cheap crap the family on the corner gives out every year.

Now comes the best part of the evening.  You’re ready for your sugar high and a horror movie. 
What to do?  With impeccable timing, if not cinematic skill, the folks at Warner Bros. have released the DVD of THE REAPING, a film perfect for this time of year.  Why, perfect you ask. Is the film that good?

To which I reply: “What are you smoking, weed?”  Of course not.  The film is terrible.  But consider its tagline: “What hath God wrought?”  It is about the Lord visiting the 10 plagues on a small Louisiana community.  While you, chomping on your day’s booty, are celebrating what originated as a pagan holiday.  Have you no shame?

Apparently Hilary Swank doesn’t.  She stars as Katherine Winter, a former minister who lost her faith in God when her husband and child were murdered in the Sudan where she was doing missionary work.  Over the last several years she’s taught at Louisiana State University, specializing in debunking so-called religious miracles.

Katherine receives two intriguing phone calls.  The first is from a priest she worked with in Africa.  Something strange is going on.  In every photo of her he has, her face has just burned out and when he puts the photos together the burn marks form a pattern of an inverted cycle.  She ignores his words, associating him still with her family members’ deaths.


But then there’s another call from a high school science teacher in the small town of Haven.  There’s been a mysterious death and the local river has turned blood red and a young girl is being blamed.  Can she come investigate?  Reluctantly, she and her former graduate assistant Ben (Idris Elba) go to town, and all kinds of horrible things begin to happen.  Cattle die.  Flies congregate.  Locusts come.  Lice infest the children’s hair.  It is all so very biblical. 

Not very logical, mind you.  But biblical.  The townspeople don’t want to call in the authorities because Haven is a haven, a hidden jewel, and they prefer not outsiders even know about the town.  Also, this blood-red river doesn’t flow anywhere.  It just kind of sits there, and I guess turns regular color as if flows towards the Gulf of Mexico.  The plagues too are localized?  How can that be? 

In her investigation, Katherine discovers the inverted sickle the priest warned her about. It seems there is a cult of devil worshippers in town and only she can save the world from an apocalypse.


To his credit, director Stephen Hopkins keeps the level of suspense high – assuming you are prepared to suspend disbelief.  Also, at film’s end, Katherine discovers she’s pregnant, apparently with the devil’s child a la ROSEMARY’S BABY.  This means the producers have left their options open for THE REAPING II, probably carrying a tag line: “You little devil.”