Well.... I have to admit that I am a huge fan of "Buffy" and because of that I did watch this movie because it's with Nicholas Brendon. I have to say, that I cannot say anything against his acting, because he is doing a great or even the best job of all the actors on this movie.Adrienne Barbeau, the main actress cannot ban the audience to the screen because her acting is beyond professional. She never gives you the feeling she is doing something for real and it may be the problem with the whole movie. As a main actor you have to carry the plot and if you suck, then the whole movie might do it as well.I have to admit that the plot also is not so exciting and the special effects lack of persuasion. Even shock effects are not there because e.g. when oh so scary graphics are flipped by the characters there is this sound effect which shall imply you that this should be scary but you are just like "Yeah, I got it... but there is nothing frightening at all...Can you skip to the next part already!" And there is one point when the actress just screams for Lucas all the time, which will clearly annoy you as much as it did annoy me.I think a horror movie is hard to create because you easily can stumble into a comedy. In this example it is neither. This movie lacks of excitement, a good plot and the genre specifics. Not worth the watch

An excellent and intriguing concept, detailed and appropriate production design, and very talented acting (except for the store owner, Richard Ziman, whose overacting was practically unbearable) are all marred by dreadful editing and cinematography, writing more terrifying than the story and direction bad enough to make you cry.Additionally, the depiction of a family who has just lost a daughter to suicide was offensively inaccurate. Granted, not every family's experience is the same. But there is a mourning period - a time of grief. Not once did they seem to wonder why she killed herself without thinking that she must have been forced into it. Not once did they consider that it was some sort of psychological dysfunction or emotional trauma that caused her to commit suicide... and come on, why did they say "suicide" about a billion times?! Do you really think that they would so quickly accept and deal with what she did and be able to call it "suicide" so casually? Many families can barely even utter the word so recently after the death of a love one.I initially found this movie because of Nicholas Brendon (yeah, Buffy fan, right here), and I wasn't disappointed by his performance in this movie. He was convincing at most moments, and the moments where he wasn't can be attributed to bad writing. I don't care if he's a dude, I don't care if he's a stoner, I don't care about any of that. His little sister died. Let the man cry a minute on camera before you dive head first into the mystery-solving.And lastly - I won't reveal the conclusion of the story, but I will say that it happened far too hastily and that it was poorly directed. It leaves you understanding generally what happened, but with a sense of "wait, they missed something" in addition to saying "that's IT?" As if they tried to come up with an interesting twist to the ending (which a movie of this sort sort of requires) and just... couldn't.It breaks my heart to see such a fascinating and well thought-out story come to an end like this, but a film is only as good as it's script, and "Unholy"'s script is... well, just that.

I'm not sure this is a spoiler; perhaps it is a public service. If you are one of those people focused on instant gratification who skip end credits, you will miss the final line of the end credits news announcer's voice-over, which states the U.S. has just surrendered to Nazi Germany on May 7, 1945 to end WWII. Here are just a few of the problems with this close: 1)The older viewer must conjure up the equivalent of two or three more UNHOLY movies in their mind's eye to fill in the yawning chasm between movie events and this startling conclusion.2)The average person will really kick themselves that they did not "watch" one of these UNHOLY fill-in-the-blanks flicks created in their own head for free, instead of shelling out time and money to see this UNHOLY from the video store (or on cable).3)This end credits sequence of imagined news bulletins may be the first information some younger viewers are exposed to about WWII, leading them to the conclusion that George W. Bush is the latest heir to the Nazi throne.

The main problem I see with this film is its score, which screams with every note, "This is a cheap-ass movie." There's not much more to say here. The score just plain sucked.The second problem, which I see as quite severe as well as it involves the unwinding of the plot near the end of the film (one of the the money shots, if you will), is the dialogue between Martha (Adrienne Barbeau) and the sunflower man (Richard Ziman), in which Martha is revealed to be the leader of the experiment. At all times during this dialogue, the viewer is very much aware that s/he is listening to a movie dialogue. In other words, suspension of disbelief breaks down here. The integrity of a believable dialogue between two people is sacrificed for a willy-nilly stuffing of information the movie makers wish to impart to the audience.The third problem was the casting of Adrienne Barbeau. While I honestly believe her to be a fabulous actress within her oeuvre, I feel that this part may have been too much of a stretch. The main point of her performance that didn't seem to mesh was the spectrum across which the character moves through the film from a loving mother of a troubled family to an almost Rambo-like woman on a mission. This aspect of the script would obviously have been a stretch for any actress, and one cannot place too much blame, therefore, upon Barbeau. To the degree that she fairly competently acted her part, however, I would only call this a moderately severe problem to the film as a whole.Finally, the film did a wonderful job in the first half building a creep factor, most notably during its horror flashes. I feel that the film would have benefited by more of a commitment to these flashes as a mechanism for preventing a fizzling of the creep factor in the second half of the movie.So what's my holistic grading of this piece? I'd give it a solid C+ to B-, depending upon how much credit you're inclined to give the makers for producing this film on a limited budget. Even with two severe and two moderately severe problems, the film is premised on the solid plot of the Jungian side of Nazi mysticism. I see no problems with plot development or coherence; the dialogue, with the noted exception above, is downright brilliant in places, especially the all important keystone scene between mother and daughter at the beginning of the movie; as mentioned, the creep factor was well crafted, if a bit fizzly in the second half; and Nicholas Brendan, who also associated produced, delivered a wonderful performance.All in all, this film is definitely worth the view---see it with a Nazi you love. :)