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Children of a lesser corn

A connect-the-dots plot as an altar call
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
May 2nd, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Something evil skips this way. Swank and Anna Sophia Robb in The Reaping.
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“And Moses stretched forth his rod toward heaven, and, lo, the Lord did rain clichés upon the land” — or so the verse might have read had the ancient Egyptians been foolish enough to build film studios in the vicinity of Thebes. Say what you will about showers of toads and divine bovicide, the pyramid-builders were at least spared the scourge of Hollywood.
The Reaping is a horror thriller that is inept both as a film and as a devotional advert for Christianity. It’s a scraps-and-patches affair that scissors this from The Omen, that from Race with the Devil, and what seems like generous slashes from a bolt of TV movies of the week (Crowhaven Farm and Satan’s School for Girls come to mind). 
The Reaping

Directed by Stephen Hopkins
With Hilary Swank, David Morrissey, Idris Elba, Anna Sophia Robb and Stephen Rea

All the props and dramatis personae of the genre are dragged out. There’s the adept Catholic priest who will stumble upon esoteric Satanic knowledge in mouldering books with pertinent woodcut prints; there’s the rational thinker who will soon question the veracity of science in the face of the inexplicable; the seemingly normal isolated village of clapboard homes and churches; and, finally, the demonic child (here a pre-pubescent Carrie) who seems to be at the center of strange occurrences. Yet, in the running up of this fright costume, certain loose threads were left hanging — but more of that later.
Father Michael (Stephen Rea) feels compelled to contact a former colleague from a Sudan missionary station after photographs bearing her image spontaneously combust. The colleague, Katherine Winter (Hilary Swank), lost her faith in the Christian god out in the barren wastes of Africa and since that time has devoted her life to debunking religious miracles at a university in Louisiana.
The good father’s phone call to her is unwelcomed. He insists that this bonfire of the Polaroids heralds some coming evil. He also wishes that she, an ordained minister, would be able once more to find her way back into the fold.
Let us creep past the question of what a Catholic and a Protestant were doing at the same missionary camp in the Sudan, and welcome the appearance of a worried stranger from a blue bayou that’s suddenly turned red. Doug Blackwell (and dig the name) has arrived at Katherine’s university office to tell of odd doin’s out near his town of Haven (without the “crow”).
The local bayou has gone bloody after the murder of a boy, and the townsfolk are on the verge of dusting off their torches and pitchforks to chase down the dead boy’s sinister little sister, certain that this spectacle indicates a reprisal of Cecil B. DeMille’s wrath upon Pharoah.
In short, but nonchronological, order, the mythical plagues of Exodus appear on the landscape: maggots, locust, boils and murrain. Katherine’s rational explanations for these phenomena are severely tested. If only she would throw off the shackles of Enlightenment thinking — if she could just let go and let God.
Angels and demons are again quarreling in our midst, which is hardly surprising, as the promised Anti-Christ might well be a bun in a Haven housewife’s oven. Still, we have to wish the little world-destroyer luck, as he’s far from the prestigious perch in U.S. politics that Damien assumed, not to mention the wisdom and good taste of Rosemary’s dark baby, who was hatched in the corridors of the Dakota. The Reaping’s little imp is somehow going to have to rise out of the Bible Belt and cracker culture to command the globe.
The chills of The Reaping are as second-hand as the plotting, while the parade of CGI plagues all seem a bit too obvious (who could ever match the rain of frogs from Magnolia?). The worst part of this trite horror is the talent that’s squandered: Not only Rea and Swank, but two very fine British actors, David Morrissey as Doug Blackwell, and Idris Elba as Katherine’s colleague, Ben, who, by virtue of being a black Christian, is naturally foredoomed not to survive the whirlwind reaped by Haven. Nor will we be likely to escape from this corn’s curse unscathed.
   

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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