Not to be extra dour, but I feel like 'Deadly blessing' tells us everything about itself that it needs to, within a fraction of the length, for us to form a strong impression. And it's not a great one: it bears a fair premise and some good ideas, and is, broadly, competently made. At best, though, this movie just doesn't make much of a mark. At worst, it's a sloppy mess.
What here have we not seen before? I suppose in fairness one could observe that this marks early film roles of a few actors, if not their film debuts. Beyond this: suitable as some ideas are for a narrative, or the basis of one, they don't feel very interesting - at least not as they appear here - let alone remarkable, or unique. Suggested supernatural goings-on, a creepy and definitively patriarchal cult, echoes of the profoundly oppressive sociopolitical views of real-life religious conservatives; a horror-thriller score that's unusually common for James Horner, or even cheesy or imitative; scene writing, camerawork, and characters that are outright genre convention. All these things and more could practically be cut and pasted to or from many other titles without any loss of fidelity or cohesion, including tried and true themes of traditional versus modern values. That doesn't mean that 'Deadly blessing' is bad, but it does mean that it won't stand out in a crowd.
The acting is a mixed bag, but the filming locations are swell; those stunts and effects we see look good. Some of what we do get is at least executed well, but the orchestration of one scene to the next is uneven, oscillating between opposite ends of a spectrum of quality. On the other hand, the movie suffers from a languishing pace, and it's certainly longer than it needs to be. However, if the rest of the movie prior was questionable, in the last stretch it takes a nosedive. The reveal of The Bad Guy is entirely unconvincing, not really seeming to meaningfully fit into the plot we'd gotten so far. More than that, it's also vaguely transphobic - as if one of the writers wanted to be more discretely anti-queer, but didn't know how, or didn't dare be so bare-faced about it, or perhaps was outvoted by his co-writers. The climax feels rushed, and haphazard, and falls flat as it, too, fails to sustain suspension of disbelief. Then, as though said previous reveal didn't throw a wrench in the works, the very ending does so again in another way. The last scene could have been and has been useful in other movies; here, it's all but nonsensical.
It really seems like the sort of horror flick you can "watch" without truly engaging with it, and the view is less of an experience and more like checking an item off on a mundane to-do list. But then, I'm not sure why you'd want to watch it in the first place. Perhaps my expectations were set too high based simply on Wes Craven's name; is he not supposed to be a master of horror? Then again, I thought 'The hills have eyes' was rubbish, so maybe I should've known better.
Look, I hope other folks get more out of this than I do. For my part, I think 'Deadly blessing' is such a godawful trainwreck that I can't in good conscience recommend it. There are far better movies you could watch; try anything else instead.
What here have we not seen before? I suppose in fairness one could observe that this marks early film roles of a few actors, if not their film debuts. Beyond this: suitable as some ideas are for a narrative, or the basis of one, they don't feel very interesting - at least not as they appear here - let alone remarkable, or unique. Suggested supernatural goings-on, a creepy and definitively patriarchal cult, echoes of the profoundly oppressive sociopolitical views of real-life religious conservatives; a horror-thriller score that's unusually common for James Horner, or even cheesy or imitative; scene writing, camerawork, and characters that are outright genre convention. All these things and more could practically be cut and pasted to or from many other titles without any loss of fidelity or cohesion, including tried and true themes of traditional versus modern values. That doesn't mean that 'Deadly blessing' is bad, but it does mean that it won't stand out in a crowd.
The acting is a mixed bag, but the filming locations are swell; those stunts and effects we see look good. Some of what we do get is at least executed well, but the orchestration of one scene to the next is uneven, oscillating between opposite ends of a spectrum of quality. On the other hand, the movie suffers from a languishing pace, and it's certainly longer than it needs to be. However, if the rest of the movie prior was questionable, in the last stretch it takes a nosedive. The reveal of The Bad Guy is entirely unconvincing, not really seeming to meaningfully fit into the plot we'd gotten so far. More than that, it's also vaguely transphobic - as if one of the writers wanted to be more discretely anti-queer, but didn't know how, or didn't dare be so bare-faced about it, or perhaps was outvoted by his co-writers. The climax feels rushed, and haphazard, and falls flat as it, too, fails to sustain suspension of disbelief. Then, as though said previous reveal didn't throw a wrench in the works, the very ending does so again in another way. The last scene could have been and has been useful in other movies; here, it's all but nonsensical.
It really seems like the sort of horror flick you can "watch" without truly engaging with it, and the view is less of an experience and more like checking an item off on a mundane to-do list. But then, I'm not sure why you'd want to watch it in the first place. Perhaps my expectations were set too high based simply on Wes Craven's name; is he not supposed to be a master of horror? Then again, I thought 'The hills have eyes' was rubbish, so maybe I should've known better.
Look, I hope other folks get more out of this than I do. For my part, I think 'Deadly blessing' is such a godawful trainwreck that I can't in good conscience recommend it. There are far better movies you could watch; try anything else instead.