Skip to main content

Mercy (2014) - More People Do Things In The Name Of Love Than Anything Else

Often, I find myself asking things like, "How did I accidentally pick another zombie movie to watch?" or "How did I accidentally pick another found footage movie to watch?" Tonight, on the heels of watching The Taking of Deborah Logan, I have to pose the question, "How did I accidentally pick another Stephen King movie and another possession movie to watch?"

There was very little I could turn up on the internet about this movie, leading me to believe no one really gives a crap about it. There's good reason for this: like most movie adaptations of King's stories, the plot is convoluted, the tone is that of a made for tv movie, the writing is childish, and the acting is uneven (at best). I have never seen such pathetic fake crying before this. 

Alright, here's the gist: 
A woman must move back to her childhood home to care for her ailing mother. Which is pretty much the identical story of Deborah Logan. "Ailing," in this case, turns out to mean, "sold her soul to the devil and is now paying the price for that sale." As you might expect. Along for the ride are the woman's two teenage sons; one wants to be a chef and the other talks to spirits. Cryptic messages are delivered, supernatural encounters are had, and oh yes, people die. Unfortunately, not nearly enough of them, if I'm honest. The ending is some bullshit, happily ever after nonsense. I was actually worried that they were going to have the soulless grandmother live. Thankfully, she doesn't.

Great segue here: what I did turn up about the source material is that it ends very differently than the movie. Apparently, King's unhappy ending didn't fly with the studio - which is a bummer because it reads way better than the movie ending.

There are shades of Pet Sematary and The Shining coloring this one, but that doesn't help the story any. Perhaps this one is the final, unequivocal proof that Stephen King loves money more than he cares about his art. Side note here: the source material is actually pretty old. My point here is that the movie version is shit and is clearly just a chance for King to make a few bucks for very little work.

I'd also like to note that I can only suspend my disbelief so far. Central to the story is a man killing himself with an axe blow to the head. Who kills themselves with an axe to the head? I guess the idea is impressively creative, if not impossible and idiotic to execute. The only redeeming piece of this movie may be the hilariously bad joke that the death by axe is called (by one of the characters) an "axe-ident." Puns. Glorious puns.

Top all this off with Dylan Mcdermott running around pointlessly in the middle of it all, still desperately trying to convince the world that he's a real actor... to no avail.

Watch it if: you like sub-par stories about selling your soul to the devil.

For your viewing displeasure, the Mercy trailer:

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Rebuttal: 17 Disturbing Horror Movies You Will Never Watch Again

When I'm not watching movies, I'm reading about movies. I stumble across all kinds of articles, blog posts, book excerpts, etc. in my quest to absorb as much movie knowledge as possible. Now, I'm snotty and loud-mouthed and opinionated but I'd never begrudge another human their opinion. Seriously. You're absolutely welcome to have any opinion about any thing you want. However, I must warn you, if I think your opinion is stupid, I'm absolutely going to say so. I've recently stumbled on an article completely  brimming with so many idiotic opinions that I'm actually compelled to craft a response. Here's the gist of the original article: there are some horror movies out there that are so disturbing , you'll only ever want to watch them once. I've have taken her original list and refuted her claims without pulling her entire article over. You can read the original article here . Let's start at the beginning, with her opening statement

What Is Genre And Why Should I Care?

There are terms that always seem to come up when talking about films: director, actor, plot, theme, score, etc. These terms are all self-explanatory; no one ever asks, ‘what’s a director?’ However, there are other terms that are equally common but less clear: genre, sub-genre, auteur, oeuvre, etc. These terms are more abstract then ‘director’ or ‘actor.’ It is entirely likely that someone will ask, ‘what is genre, anyway?’ This question specifically is what I will be answering with this paper. The answer to the question ‘what is genre,’ is multi-layered: genre is a means of classification. Genre is a means of communication. Genre is a means of understanding films. Genre is a means of relating to films. To one person all movies rated “PG” are a genre – possibly one also known as “children’s movies” – while to another all movies with similar topics treated in similar ways are a genre: i.e. movies dealing with frontier life depicted in a nostalgic manner are a genre often kn

Contracted Or I Just Watched A Zombie Movie

Seems like horror fans fall into two buckets these days: zombie lovers and zombie haters. That dividing line just keeps getting deeper and darker the more zombies gain "mainstream popularity". I currently fall into the "I am so tired of zombies I could puke" bucket. I haven't stopped  watching zombie movies so much as I've started avoiding them at all costs, literally watching every other subgenre offering I stumble onto, regardless of how terrible it is. I seriously re-watched Wishmaster  this past week. That's how far out of my way I've been going to avoid the significant number of zombie movies flooding Netflix. Then I accidentally watched one. Contracted - 2013 I'm sure it was partially due to the really terrible movie synopsis that Netflix provided, which I'm prepared to admit that they may have nothing to do with and  that I likely didn't read it very well. In a strange twist of events, the movie cover actually helped