God Only Knows!:- Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Rosemary's Baby is a 1968 film based off of the book of the same name which was published in 1967.
A Horror/Mystery film at heart (its surprising how most films with a religious theme tend to fall in to either mystery, horror , or a combination of the two catagories) , the story of an ordinary young married couple just starting out in life takes a few rather sinister twists as the plot advances, culminating in a rather disturbing and not terribly happy ending.

Mia Farrow stars as Rosemary Woodhouse, a pretty but somewhat naive young woman who alongside her husband, moves into an apartment block in downtown New York.
Rosemary's husband, Guy (played by John Cassavetes) is a struggling young actor who is waiting for his big break, and thus as a couple they don't really have much money between them, but, they decide to settle down and start a family nonetheless.
The other residents of the apartment block, mostly elderly couples, seem to take great delight in having the young couple living there, and busy themselves with "helping" the newlyweds out in any way they can, which annoys Rosemary as she sees their help as interference. Guy dismisses her concerns and says that the old folk are just being friendly, and points out that in all fairness, they could use the help.

Things take a strange turn when not long after Guy finally gets his break by securing a part in a big budget Broadway production. On the night that Guy and Rosemary attempt to conceive the baby that they had planned for, Rosemary has a vivid dream in which she finds herself being raped by a horrifying monster. She wakes up screaming but Guy manages to calm her down.

Not long after, Rosemary finds that she is pregnant, and once again, the elderly residents clamour round to provide assistance by giving her "vitamin drinks" and advice about coping with pregnancy, and, although she initially follows their advice, she begins to get worried when she starts feeling ill so on the advice of her doctor, she stops taking any of the vitamins etc that the elderly folk give her, although things suddenly begin to get more sinister when Rosemary's doctor dies in mysterious circumstances and is replaced by a doctor who advises her the exact opposite of the previous one.

Rosemary eventually gives birth but unfortunately for her, the baby is far from what she was expecting....

Mia Farrow delivers a brilliant performance as the young and naive Rosemary, and it is a pleasure to see her character rapidly learn the harsh truths of the world that surrounds her.

The other characters of the film, who are pretty much nothing but interchangeable support characters, John Cassavetes included, provide the much needed and numerous "prods" required to advance the story, although special mention has to go to the characters of Minnie and Roman Castavete, whose eccentric performances bely their sinister motives throughout the piece.

To sum up, Rosemary's Baby is a finely crafted piece of film which has often been imitated but rarely bettered, and although both the original book and this film did spawn sequels, none of them were as popular or as well liked as the original.

I give this film 9 sacrificial lambs out of 10

God Only Knows!:- "The Sin Eater" (2003)

Kicking off a short season of films with a religious theme:-


"The Sin Eater" , also released under the rather ambiguous title "The Order", Is a 2003 Religious/Mystery/Horror film Starring the late Heath Ledger, Peter Weller, Mark Addy and a slew of other people, none of which Ive ever heard of.


The film itself is strangely categorised as a "mystery-horror" type film, although I'm not quite sure where the horror element comes into it, and as for the mystery portion, well, its not a very good or surprising one is all I'm going to say, just to spare those of you that haven't seen it from moaning about spoilers.

The plot is fairly simplistic, a young priest from a dying priestly order which concerns itself with banishing ghosts, demons and other such things that the Catholic Church now considers embarrassing finds that his mentor and surrogate father figure has died under mysterious circumstances, and during the course of his investigations, he finds out that a conspiracy involving the upper echelons of the holy see has a lot to answer for, especially when he runs across something thought only to exist in times past turns up in the 21st century.

Heath Ledger stars as Alex Bernier, the principal character of the piece , and he pulls it off quite well, sure, Alex ain't no Joker, but at this point in his career, old Heath hadn't really been in too many films, much less where he was the headliner.

Peter Weller puts in a good performance as the enigmatic Cardinal Driscoll, proving that even though he generally doesn't appear in many films, he can still deliver a good performance.

Mark Addy provides a good effort as Alex's sidekick, the Irish priest "Thomas Garrett", although for some really odd reason the scriptwriters decided to permeate his dialogue with the phrase "spaghetti-O", which although intended to act as a friendly nickname for Alex, instead ends up just being annoying and sticking out like a sore thumb.

The storyline, to me at least, seems to be a little rushed in places, but does manage to remain coherent enough so that you don't get lost along the way, although some elements of plot development seem to be a bit extraneous, for example the exposition about Mara's background, seem like they are leftovers from an earlier and much more ambitious script draft that were somehow missed when the dialogue was being trimmed down.
Dialogue wise, some of the scenes, particularly ones featuring the character Mara, are very wooden, its clear that Ledger and the actress playing Mara didn't have much chemistry as they exchange pieces of romantic speech in a very awkward manner.

For what it is though, "The Sin Eater" isn't a bad film, but its by no means a good one. At the box office it performed badly, and reviews of it generally tend towards the middling, its only real point of notoriety came from complaints received by 20th Century Fox about its content and depiction of the Catholic Church.


I give it 7 out of 10 sacrificial lambs.