Films come in all shapes, sizes, and levels of quality. Some are so bad they’re good, with their all-encompassing awfulness inspiring laughter. The Reverend means well, but ultimately has to fall into the second category.
Stuart Brennan plays the title character, an idealistic young Reverend assigned to his first parish. Despite some questions over his youth, his new flock seems to take to him well. But one bite from a mysterious woman and he’s gained a Wolverine-like healing factor, along with a thirst for blood. As a righteous man, the story tackles his use of the powers to clean up the world around him. That world being a village containing a seedy underbelly lead by local businessman Harold Hickman (Tamer Hassan).
Brennan comes off best of all the cast members as he attempts to imbue his character with some feeling. To say the blame lies at his feet would be harsh, as the script doesn’t help him at all.
Moving on to the two biggest names in the cast; we have Rutger Hauer and Shane Richie. How did they have the budget for this? It’s quite simple – they are barely in it. Hauer picks up an easy pay cheque to provide a cameo and be a big name on marketing material. Richie provides us with what I can only describe as Alfie Moon on coke. Craft services must have been absent, as he desperately tries to chew the scenery with a range of squints, ticks and cursing. None of it is effective.
Hassan’s main problem is that he should have picked one accent and stuck with it. Constantly flitting between cockney hard nut and country toff (sometimes in the same sentence) doesn’t do him any favours, and completely undermines any sort of menace his character should have. This affliction seems to have affected others in the film, with one character in particular moving between an American, English and Irish accent in one scene. I’d laugh if it weren’t so terrible.
The cast is rounded out with a variety of well-meaning actors who couldn’t act their way out of a paper bag. The Police Inspector in particular seems to have come from a particularly bad police training video, as he warns our protagonist to steer clear of the village’s nastier folk. An awkward montage off many characters when the film realises there’s been no action for a while. Problem is, we don’t care about any of them.
Considering the film’s budget, the rather gruesome effects are pulled off pretty well, and the makeup team deserve some credit. But cameras that don’t know where they should be focusing and sound that is barely understandable at times make an already poor film more difficult to follow.
This leads us to this film’s main problem, which is its lack of focus. Is it a religious study or a horror film? Jones, who wrote, produced and directed needed some help here. If only someone had stepped in it could have been far tighter and been a lot better in at least one genre.
The story borrows heavily from The Book of Job (a book of the Hebrew Bible mentioned several times), which asks the question “why do the righteous suffer?”
The Reverend left me wondering…Why should the audience?
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