THE RECKONING
Amazing Grace
RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | TBC | Download
Director Neil Marshall
Cast Charlotte Kirk, Sean Pertwee,
Steven Waddington, Joe Anderson
Dog Soldiers/the Descent director Neil Marshall’s latest closes with a title card about the estimated numbers of women killed by witchhunters, but don’t expect a sober, earnest affair. This gruellingly over-extended 17th century horror feels like the sort of lurid shocker Hammer might have made, if censorship standards were as they are now.
Sean Pertwee, resplendent in a very silly hat, plays Moorcroft, a Witchfinder called in after plague widow Grace (Charlotte Kirk, whose Aussie twang feels weirdly anachronistic) fights off the local squire’s rapey attentions. He subjects her to four days of grim torture, but Grace somehow maintains both her resolve and her just-stepped-out-of-a salon tumbling locks.
All this female empowerment should leave you yelling “You go girl!”, but it’s just too risibly implausible. After a sequence featuring a “Pear of Anguish” (Google it, if you really must), Grace should surely be unable to walk, let alone fight back.
And dream sequences where she makes love to a winged (and inaudibly mumbly) Devil add little beyond a lot of gleaming buttocks, and feel like something from an Italian exploitation flick of the ’70s. Compared to the likes of The Witch, it all seems a little cheesy. Ian Berriman
Moorcroft’s relationship with his female assistant was inspired by Warlock, a 1959 western about a freelance marshal.