2011 October Horror Movie Challenge Movie 53: Hallowed

This is one of those rare little horror flick where everything that SHOULDN'T work inexplicably does, and it turns what should be an excruciating viewing experience into an enjoyable one. The opening sequence shows a little boy who looks up to his Priest (like a lot of young children in the church, he associates his Priest as God) and instead of going for the cheap shot and making the Priest a molester, the movie makes him a genuinely kind, caring guy, which is a surprising twist from what I expected. The little boy has a frightening home life, with a violent father who beats his mother and one night murders her, which causes the boy to have a breakdown and be committed to an asylum. 20 years later, the boy is out, walking around his old neighborhood handing out bibles and preaching some message about how God wants him to cleanse the world from sin (uh oh, this doesn't bode well for the residents of the town in question). The actor playing this guy can't act, and he says his lines in a wooden, robotic way that I usually HATE, but for some reason, in THIS particular movie, it works and makes him seem even more creepy. Usually I hate that wooden line-reading crap and it's the fastest way for a movie to piss me off, but like I said, what usually makes a movie bad, somehow in THIS movie works to make it better than it would otherwise be. The gore is pretty well done in this movie, and there are a few deaths that come as a surprise because typically these characters would be expected to live in a movie like this. I don't know if the movie turns these expectations on their heads because it's a good movie that knows what it's doing, or because it's totally inept, but either way, it somehow works and makes the movie a satisfying viewing experience where I expected it to be terrible.