British
director Neil Marshall’s career has had its fair share of ups and downs over
the past twenty years. Forging a strong
following with his werewolf horror venture Dog Soldiers before cementing
his status as a great director with The Descent, there was nowhere else
for Marshall to go but up. Then came Doomsday,
Centurion and his much maligned Hellboy reboot and his career
quickly took a nose-dive. Long overdue
for a much needed return to horror, Marshall now presents The Reckoning,
an updated horror reworking of the Witchfinder General or Mark of the
Devil witch hunt film that mostly returns the director to form but also brings
forward the divisive screenwriting and acting talents of actress/fiancée Charlotte
Kirk.
Co-written
by Marshall, Kirk and Edvard Evers-Swindell, this Budapest, Hungary shot 1665
set period piece follows Grace (Charlotte Kirk), a young English widow who
finds herself accused of consorting with Satan after her husband dies of the
plague. Much like Mark of the Devil,
Grace fends off her sleazy landlord’s sexual advances only to be accused of
witchcraft in return, eventually bringing in the sadistic witchfinder Moorcroft
(Sean Pertwee from Event Horizon) to forcibly extract a confession from her. A modern-day witch hunt film by way of
Marshall’s The Descent, the film is an entertaining and often sexy B
horror movie that begins initially as an endurance test of torture before
ballooning into a comic-book inspired revenge feminist fantasy.
While a
welcome return to the genre that made him a namesake, Marshall as a director
seems to be playing second fiddle to Charlotte Kirk who is clearly running this
show. Though it touches on many of the
bleak and despairing notes of The Descent it never quite goes all the
way and one suspects Kirk played a bigger hand in steering this ship towards
her own cinematic aims than Marshall is telling. Pertwee is great as the witchfinder, evoking
Vincent Price’s Witchfinder General and the film’s period production
design and visual style are dynamic and even lush. However, as a connoisseur of the so called ‘nunsploitation’
subgenre, The Reckoning falls somewhat short of the horrors conjured up
in, say, Ken Russell’s The Devils and shares a mere fraction of that
film’s intellectual and artistic heights.
--Andrew Kotwicki
