Hallowed Be Thy Name is a horror film from 2020. I’ve seen the tagline go something in the lines of “some prayers aren’t meant to be unanswered”. It’s a pretty cool tagline, I must say. It’s basically about this cave where people can go and make a wish and the wish might actually come true. Although it is not a good place to go and something very bad can happen if you wander inside there. This doesn’t seem to stop people though.
Right at the very beginning we see a couple of kids go in and disappear just to emphasize it’s a bad place I guess. It’s really just a teaser but at least it gives us some kind of clue to what lurks in there. The movie then shifts focus to an older boy and his mom going to that exact town where this just happened. One thing leads to another and as the new kid starts his new school already the next day he meets some new friends.
I don’t really mind it so much so far. I kind of like the story. The main premise is that there is a demon or something similar living in the cave which haunts, kills and terrorizes those brave enough to enter. Of course, bravery and stupidity almost go hand in hand. Why go there if there’s rumors of something dangerous lurking there? But never mind that. It’s a good enough start for the plot as anything else.
Unfortunately it doesn’t get any better from there. If you go and read the user reviews on IMDB there’s a lot of comments about the really bad or even abysmal acting. I actually didn’t think it was that bad. Don’t get me wrong, the end result portraying these kids is a mess. But I don’t really blame the actors. I think this is due to bad directing. A director needs to make his actors understand the scenes they are participating in and what emotions they should be experiencing. There’s none of that here. No one even seems to care what’s going on.
There is the main story as I said, which I kind of like, but the relationships between the characters and what’s really going on is so hollow that it’s annoying. They don’t care what happens so why should we – the audience?
I did manage to sit through the whole thing but it was very hard to concentrate at the end. There was just no energy or emotion at all. Details in the character development that makes no sense at all (which I blame on the script) and highly illogical events take place. The makeup effects, i.e. blood and gore, work pretty well but when it comes to portraying this demon it’s pretty underwhelming.
If anyone has seen this, do you care to explain what that was in the very end? I mean just after the credits had started rolling. I truly don’t get what that was supposed to tell us.
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