| 75 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
An effectively unsettling mix of Southern gothic and Old Testament hugger-mugger, with shades of "The Exorcist" and even "Rosemary's Baby" thrown in.
|
| 60 |
The Hollywood Reporter
One either likes this sort of thing or not. Even fans might not buy the ending in which more people get wiped out than in Hurricane Katrina.
|
| 60 |
Variety
Revisiting the book of Exodus in a feverish Southern-gothic context, this lurid, often ludicrously entertaining slab of Biblesploitation builds an earnest case for spirituality in a skeptical age.
|
| 60 |
Los Angeles Times
Michael Ordona
The seeds of most Biblical horror movies are sown in the Book of Revelations; The Reaping at least gets marks for originality for springing from Exodus.
|
| 58 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
The Reaping is Bible camp, pure and simple. And for bad-movie lovers, it's manna from heaven.
|
| 58 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
For genre fans, the horde-of-locust sequence may alone be worth the price of admission.
|
| 50 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Notable for its enthusiastic abandonment of any semblance of narrative coherence.
|
| 50 |
New York Daily News
The script, which is rarely smart and barely scary, offers little more than a checklist of panic-inducing plagues, from locusts to boils to bad Southern accents.
|
| 50 |
New York Post
This stuff is strictly run of DeMille.
|
| 50 |
TV Guide
Swank and Elba work hard for their paychecks, but Rea quite literally phones in his performance.
|
| 40 |
The New York Times
The only remotely notable thing about this particular jumble of boos, bangs and door creaks...is that it tries to wed the horror trend with the heated-up God market.
|
| 38 |
Chicago Tribune
Ludicrous and overstuffed, it plows through the Big 10 of Biblical plagues.
|
| 38 |
Premiere
Some of the effects are squirm-worthy, if not actually frightening. Amid all the fake profundity, those moments -- you know, when the film is actually entertaining -- are rare.
|
| 38 |
ReelViews
It's hard to say what is more responsible for the film's utter failure: Hopkins direction, the editing, or the screenplay. The result is such a muddle that one assumes each aspect deserves part of the blame.
|
| 33 |
Entertainment Weekly
No belief on earth can rescue Swank from a film that's a chain of disaster chintz masquerading as a sermon.
|
| 30 |
Village Voice
Scott Foundas
Those two age-old foes--science and blind faith--tango yet again in this noxious slice of Biblical horror about a series of Old Testament plagues being visited upon a Louisiana bayou backwater.
|
| 30 |
Austin Chronicle
Pardon the pun, but audiences will reap little from this satanic backwoods juju thriller.
|
| 30 |
Film Threat
The Reaping isn't a total failure. Swank is never less than competent.
|
| 30 |
Washington Post
If only The Reaping had the decency to be coherent.
|
| 25 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Although The Reaping' borrows elements from classics of the genre -- rips them off might be more accurate -- it fails to build the psychological tension that made them so creepily good.
|
| 25 |
USA Today
As if this drivel weren't bad enough, the ending blatantly threatens a sequel
|
| 12 |
Boston Globe
Long-delayed, pitiful excuse for a horror film.
|
| 10 |
Chicago Reader
This high-decibel shocker is an insult to intelligence and faith alike.
|
