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STAR RATINGS EXPLAINED
Unmissable 5 Stars
Excellent 4 Stars
Good 3 Stars
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Tragic 1 Star

POSTER ART
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FILM DETAILS
Certificate
15
Cast
Hilary Swank
Stuart Greer
Andrea Frankle
David Morrissey
Annasophia Robb
Stephen Rea.
Directors
Stephen Hopkins.
Screenwriters
Running Time
19 minutes

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The Reaping
Hilary Swank finds religious horror is the devil’s work


Plot
Katherine Winter (Swank) is a former minister who lost her faith and now debunks ‘miracles’ through scientific analysis. However, when a child is killed in a small Louisiana town, Katherine finds herself faced with phenomena not as easy to explain.

Review
The Reaping
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This is Hilary Swank’s second foray in as many months into theoretically more ‘commercial’ projects. This time it’s religious horror, a genre with a respectable pedigree. But for every Exorcist there’s at least one Exorcist sequel, and perhaps Swank might have considered fellow Oscar-winner Halle Berry’s experience on Gothika before signing up.
 
The premise isn’t without potential — Swank’s spiritually disillusioned heroine is an interesting figure for our times, if one that requires some suspension of disbelief. She travels the globe, a world authority on dissecting seeming miracles and revealing them for what they truly are (mostly viruses, apparently). So even when director Stephen Hopkins — responsible for a large chunk of 24’s first season — gets things off to a flying start, pitching her into a particularly nasty bleeding-eye situation in Africa, it’s still not enough to distract from the rather silly notion of a ‘professional debunker’, even one with a related sideline as a college lecturer.
 
As the action shifts to the isolated backwater town of Haven, where a child’s death has seemingly prompted all manner of strange phenomena (a river of blood, dead fish and frogs), proceedings take a turn for the traditional as Swank finds herself shacked up in a remote, dilapidated mansion with a taciturn possible love interest (David Morrissey). He’s given to the odd portentous pronouncement —“I come from a long line of only children…” — and in hot pursuit of an enigmatic angel/devil child (an effective AnnaSophia Robb), who may or may
not hold the key to the mystery.
 
Twin-brother writing team Chad and Carey Hayes (House Of Wax) come up with
a handful of mild jumps, while Hopkins’ up-close and intimate camera style creates a degree of tension, but as Haven succumbs to what appears to be a revisitation of the Biblical ten plagues and Katherine is ever more at a loss to explain it all, the screenplay fatally veers into absurd melodrama, any sense of peril lost amidst unintentional laughs, building to a crushingly lame and confused denouement. The impressive cast do their best to bring a sense of conviction to the piece, but it had to have been blind faith that brought them into such an unholy mess.


Verdict
A horror that invokes memories of The Exorcist, The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby; unfortunate, since those memories only emphasise how flawed this is.


Reviewed by Liz Beardsworth

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Your Reviews

Average user rating for The Reaping
Empire Star Rating

Scary And Good.

The Reaping is a horror movie with ten plauges terrfiying a local town due to a young girl brother's death. Hilary Swank is there to solve the case, figureing out what kind of other reasons it could happen but as the plauges are running down, she starts to wonder if what she is seeing is a act of God. A scary and good movie with excellent special effects and a horrifying twisting ending. ... More

Empire User Rating

Posted by joanna likes films at 10:38, 31 May 2008 | Report This Post


Rubbish

Once again RUBBISH! ... More

Empire User Rating

Posted by jonathanegan1 at 23:11, 29 October 2007 | Report This Post


Rubbish

Once again RUBBISH! ... More

Empire User Rating

Posted by jonathanegan1 at 23:11, 29 October 2007 | Report This Post


Absolutely bloody hilarious!

Caught this with my mates the other day, and literally hurt on the way out I was laughing so much. Okay, so we may have been a bit giddy 'cause we got in for a 15 when we're only 14, but there really were some top class laughs along the way. The plot veers horribly off course when the whole 'devil-child' prospect is introduced and all plot strands congregate at the climax to form a perplexing, incomprehensable mess. But don't go for the story. Apart from some decent jumps, the only thing horrify... More

Empire User Rating

Posted by movie nerd!!! at 15:52, 29 April 2007 | Report This Post


Reaping nothing

How could a double oscar winner end up in tis trash is beyond me- ccoulnt bear any more than 45 mins ... More

Empire User Rating

Posted by moviemaniac2 at 21:35, 23 April 2007 | Report This Post


A Review Of "The Reaping"

Quite good. Good plot and twist at the end. A bit too complicated for my liking though. There was a lot of potential in this film but they didn't quite pull it off. Good. But could have been better. ... More

Empire User Rating

Posted by horrorjoe at 15:17, 22 April 2007 | Report This Post


RE: The Reaping

Just boring. Not bad exactly, just ... meh. ... More

Empire User Rating

Posted by joemanji at 16:39, 20 April 2007 | Report This Post



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