We Still Say Grace

I kinda liked this! Bruce Davison was fun to watch in this. A little bit of religious fanaticism which blooms into fierce control, lies , and murder. Entertaining. Not Great. Not too bad. 5/10.

It's as though there were two different production companies with two separate crews, one team working to make a decent horror film, the other intent on making a cheesy one. It was like watching a pair of Siamese twins fight each other for 90 minutes. The story was decent, Bruce Davison and Holly Taylor are great, just about everything else was schlock. Okay, Bruce Davison was awesome. I think the current 5.4 is a good rating.

For the first 50 minutes or so the movie manages to rise above its familiar premise: the group of hip young people with a car break-down near an isolated family of rural folk. Here, "Harold" plays the patriarch of an ultra-devout Christian family that live without a phone in a remote country area. He offers to help and invites the young men into his home on condition that they abide by his rules.

Of course, the farmer has daughters; and so part of the plot will center on one of them being peeled off via an attraction between the younger daughter and one of the three young men. So far, so good; and the movie does a decent job of not simply turning Harold into a hypocrite Christian who mouths platitudes while hiding dark secrets (which he obviously does).

The problems come in the last thirty minutes. First, the movie is quite a bit too long, and so the slow burn becomes a drag by that point. Second, the film is a social-psychological thriller for the first hour but then switches gears and veers into horror territory with some pretty stark episodes toward the end. The problem is the disjuncture from what came before. What started in Hallmark Channel fashion ends in "Farm House" (2008) territory. The acting is decent, but the material does not always bring out the finest in what is an experienced group of actors.

Thought it was quite interesting until the last 30 minutes when it got really boring. Shame that the hired such a bad actor to play the main daughter Sarah. She was practically laughing all the time when someone got killed or other dramatic stuff happened.

Strong acting, interesting storyline and suspenseful. The movie held my attention throughout. It felt real, like it just might actually be possible.

The only downside is that it's a story that's been told before. But to be honest , this version is one of the better ones. Definitely recommended.