This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will.
Plot Overview
College student Stefani Reyes
(Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is keeping her roommate up at night with
recurring nightmares. A classroom lecture on "vector
multiplication" only makes matters worse. She's on academic
probation and can't get her work done. In desperation she goes to
her cousins to track down her grandmother Iris (Gabrielle
Rose) who she perceives is connected to her dreams. Iris is a
paranoiac holed up in a fortified cabin to protect her from Death whom she cheated in an incident of Stefani's dreams.
In 1968 young Iris
(Brec Bassinger) was escorted by Paul Campbell (Max Lloyd-Jones)
her boyfriend of three years to the grand opening of the aptly
named Skyview Restaurant. It was adequately designed for a sedate
crowd to enjoy a spectacular view looking down, way down, but the
entertainment for the crowded venue featured black
musicians playing foot-stomping rock music, which was like to bring
down the house in a heap. It would have been better to segregate
that stuff to some basement dive where the natives could pound
it out on the dirt floor. Also some kid threw his lucky penny into
the mix, engraved like an omen with the face of Abraham Lincoln the
great emancipator. Iris acting on a premonition forced the show to stop and
after investigation the restaurant was closed for renovation.
Before Iris expires from old age or
whatever, she gives Stephanie her research detailing the
sequential deaths of those saved from the earlier pending
restaurant disaster and their resulting family lines. Iris's
firstborn son Howard (Alex Zahara) is to be next, then
Stephanie's cousins-german, and her mom and herself &
siblings. Howard receives a fine eulogy: (Rev. 21:4 JUB) “and death shall
be no more, neither shall there be any more sorrow, nor crying, nor
pain; for the former things are passed away.” Cousin Erik
(Richard Harmon) tops the list now and seems especially vulnerable
working in a seedy tattoo parlor and sporting a nose ring.
Ideology
To find in the Bible a place where death is so prominent, we have to look at the days of Noah. In Noah's day, (Gen. 6:5) “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” So he destroyed the world with a gigantic flood but saved Noah and his family in an ark.
To keep
violence in check after the flood, God instituted capital
punishment. In primitive societies without sophisticated
implements, wild beasts were used, e.g. lions den, snake pit, ant hill. A man's
brother was expected to carry out retribution, before they had a
developed legal system. (Gen. 9:5) “And surely your blood
of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it,
and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require
the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be
shed: for in the image of God made he man.”
In Noah's story a deal-breaker occurred when Noah's youngest son Ham (Gen. 9:18-19) saw a dishabille Noah (Gen. 9:20-22) and then told his brothers Shem and Japheth how he'd (Ezek. 22:10) “discovered their father's nakedness.” His brothers respected Noah's privacy (Gen. 9:23) and so received (Gen. 9:24-27) the expected blessing while Ham's lineage—there represented by his youngest son Canaan—were given an inferior status. Privacy was crucial, because without it the world would degenerate into more violence.
In FDB Iris was worried that she wasn't dressed up enough for the opening, and after breaking the news of her pregnancy to her boyfriend, he dignified it by slipping an engagement ring on her finger. Biblical Ham noising abroad Noah's state of undress is represented in the movie by the black musician's rendering of “SHOUT!”
Ham had put himself in jeopardy
according to, (Prov. 30:17)
“The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey
his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the
young eagles shall eat it.” Especially pertinent in this case
is Noah's control over the animals including the raven (Gen. 8:7.) Noah, however,
intervened to cheat death.
There's a parity of eye loss and servitude given in (Exodus 21:26) “And if a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye of his maid, that it perish; he shall let him go free for his eye's sake.” Ham and his line—represented by Canaan in his lineage—could be given servitude rather than mutilation. (Gen. 9:24-27) “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son [Ham] had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”
Ham's youngest son Canaan is the particularly noted recipient of the punishment. Later when the Israelis invaded the promised land, the Canaanites were due for destruction, but the Gibeonite branch (the Hivites of Joshua 11:19 & Gen. 10:15-17) did a deal with Joshua who was the Jewish leader. They'd heard what happened to other Canaanite tribes, so they sent ambassadors dressed as if they'd come from a long journey (Joshua 9:3-6) and persuaded Joshua to make a league with this “distant” tribe. When it was discovered they'd tricked Joshua into sparing them, (Joshua 9:24-27) he made them bondmen, which was more to their liking.
In our movie, “When you f_ck with death, things get messy.” Death engages in side actions. So too the Jews in the Bible. (1Chron. 4:39-41) “And they went to the entrance of Gedor, even unto the east side of the valley, to seek pasture for their flocks. And they found fat pasture and good, and the land was wide, and quiet, and peaceable; for they of Ham had dwelt there of old. And these written by name came in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah, and smote their tents, and the habitations that were found there, and destroyed them utterly unto this day, and dwelt in their rooms: because there was pasture there for their flocks.” Well, there was pasture.
More germane to modern times is perhaps the lineage of Cush, Ham's oldest son (Gen. 10:6,) Cush meaning black in Hebrew, having settled in Africa, some of his to become in later years African slaves. Researcher Bodie Hodge confirms that, “As a general trend, Ham is the father of many peoples in Africa” (122). Dr. Ide adds, “Ham sired four sons: Cush (translates as ‘black’) … and Canaan the youngest” (62).
In the movie Death keeps track of the lines better than the investigators do. This is reflected by Robert H. Bork in Slouching Towards Gomorrah who writes:
[Researchers] Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer … quote Charles Murray: “There's hardly a single outcome—black voting rights, access to public accommodation, employment, particularly in white collar jobs—that couldn't have been predicted on the basis of pre–1964 trend lines.” “That's pretty devastating,” the authors say. “It suggests that we have spent trillions of dollars to create an outcome that would have happened even if the government had done nothing.” (238)
A lincoln penny keeps showing up in
the flick. Liberator Lincoln never belonged to any church, and the
locals considered him a pagan with an idolatrous regard for consent
of the people. Southerners may be more sympathetic than the Yanks
to the above Bible passages. I heard a story on the radio: Seems
the Dakota Indians were conducting raids, and the army suggested
some of them be hanged as an example. They brought Lincoln a list
of three hundred some candidates. That was too many so he whittled
it down to thirty eight. They built the gallows and invited the
Indians to come see something they wanted to show them. It was
like out of a Sudermann novel:
His father had a strange manner of boxing his ears. He flung his hand into his face with the knuckles outward, so that the nails and joints left bruises on his cheeks. This kind of blow he called his “cheek-comforter,” and when he intended beating Paul he called out to him in the most affable tone, “Come here, my son, I want to comfort you.” (49)
There was a big gathering for the
unveiling of “something.” They called out the thirty
eight names and because of difficulty in pronunciation some
mistakenly thought they heard their own names called and raised
their hands and said, “That's me.” Thirty eight were
hanged simultaneously that day including three spectators.
Well, Lincoln was big on consent, and they did raise their hands. This movie is really twisted but then so is history.
Production Values
“” (2025) was directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein. It was written by Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor and Jon Watts. It was directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein. It stars Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Brec Bassinger, and Richard Harmon. There was a full cast to spread out the gore. Juana pulls off her part without making a big impression. Brec Bassinger is a nostalgic cutie from the past. All the performances were on the money. Black Tony Todd was skinny suffering from cancer. He was looking death in the eye.
MPA rated it R for strong violent/grisly accidents, and language. The towering restaurant had so many safety violations, it wouldn't take a psychic to get spooked in it. The film has so many freak accidents it's unreal. It's really well made, a successful collaboration I'd say. It was filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Runtime is 1 hour 50 minutes.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
I particularly liked the protracted tattoo parlor scene. We saw closeups of the artist engaged in piercing & drawing with marvelous self-control. He was lacking, however, in temperance being overly decorated. Accurate Bibles (KJV, ASV, JUB) enjoin us to temperance, more corrupted ones (NKJV, RSV, ESV, NIV) to self-control. They are not the same animal.
If you like a good fright fest don't miss this one.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Decent action scenes. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Amazing special effects. Video Occasion: Fit For a Friday Evening. Suspense: Don't watch this movie alone. Overall movie rating: Four stars out of five.
Works Cited
Unless otherwise noted, scripture is taken from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software.
Scripture quotation marked JUB is from the Jubilee Bible 2000. © 2013, 2020 by Ransom Press International. Web.
Drunken Noah scene rendered in a Civil War vintage woodcut, made after a drawing by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (German painter, 1794–1872) from his archive, published in 1877. Image by licensor iStock.com/Getty Images, used under license.
Hodge, Bodie. Tower of Babel: The Cultural History of Our Ancestors. Green Forest, AR: New Leaf Pub., 2013. Print.
Ide, Arthur Frederick. Noah & the Ark: The Influence of Sex, Homophobia and Heterosexism in the Flood Story and its Writing. Las Colinas: Monument Press, 1992. Print.
Lions den picture is copyright © Sweet Publishing. Licensed by
FreeBibleimages. 
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Sudermann, Hermann. Dame Care. New York: The Modern Library. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org