Even though we’re only a few short days away from Christmas, and festive favorites currently take up an awful lot of space on the most-watched rankings of the various platforms and offer, it’s become clear that horror aficionados are happy to sit back, relax and get scared sh*tless any time of year.
Plenty of scary films have posted a strong showing on streaming this month, but a special shout-out should be reserved for The Unholy, which has spent almost the entirety of the last week in the HBO Max Top 10. As per FlixPatrol, it’s still holding firm in fourth place, despite the fact it isn’t very good.
Written and directed by Evan Spiliotopoulos, the plot follows a girl who mysteriously gains the power to heal sick people after she was allegedly visited by the Virgin Mary. Naturally, word of her miracles soon spreads, and folks begin swarming in from all over the globe, before one dogged journalist uncovers an altogether different and decidedly more evil explanation for what’s going on.
It’s a decent setup, but The Unholy doesn’t deliver anything you haven’t seen before in a multitude of other religious-themed horrors. Rotten Tomatoes users have awarded it a score over twice as high as the 26% handed to the film by critics, but that’s hardly much of a recommendation when even gorehounds find it to be so middling.