October Horror 2011: Day 3 - The Believers

The Believers is a 1987 horror mystery starring Martin Sheen and Helen Shaver.



The film opens with a family of 3 getting ready for the morning when the coffee machine boils over and Martin Sheen spills the milk.  Then the mother dies in a freak coffee/electrical/spilled milk accident as Sheen and his son can do nothing but watch in horror.  After a brief scene of an African tribal ceremony involving goat sacrifice we return to Martin, who's moving into his new apartment/office in New York City.  We figure out much later in the movie that this cutscene actually takes place decades ago, but there's no indication of it.

That's one of the problems with the movie.  There's really no sense of the flow of time around the events that are depicted, which leaves the story feeling like an aimless meander.  The peripheral characters come in and out and are hard to keep track of, even when they come bearing important information.  The soundtrack cues aggressively, it's even funny at times.  They seriously played an "Evil Music" cue for barely more than a second because a character picked up a black magic Santeria artifact, then shrugged and put it back down.  They also heavily featured windchimes.

There were some good creepy moments towards the end, with snakes and spiders.  It was a pretty lackluster delivery of a sparse story, there was a fair twist ending though.  But it wasn't enough pay off for how uninteresting the rest of it was.

Tomorrow continues with Suspiria, in English this time.