Some horror films just have trouble finding their way. Blessed is one such movie. The writing is one problem. The misunderstanding of religion is an even larger issue. Samantha and her novelist husband Craig can’t have children. When he gets a large advance for his first book (dream on) they visit a fertility clinic in upstate New York where Samantha becomes pregnant with twins. The lake scenery in a light winter (actually in Romania) is the best part of the film. It’s quite evocative. The clinic, in any case, shares facilities with a cloning company. And Craig gets introduced to a tycoon who works in multiple industries, including publishing and, hmm, cloning. As Samantha grows visibly more pregnant Craig becomes more focused on his writing, neglecting her and visiting the tycoon in the city whenever he can. It’s implied that they have an understanding, but that doesn’t hold with the ending.
An Italian priest starts to warn Samantha about the evil at the clinic. Not only that, but the tycoon tells her about his fascination with saints, including Ambrose who killed an angel—Lucifer—whose blood was sealed in a vial recently stolen from the monastery in which it was kept, as per the Italian priest. That blood made its way to the cloning clinic and so, yes, Rosemary, Samantha’s carrying twin children of the devil. The priest kidnaps Samantha and prays with her, insisting that she take poison to banish the evil. He then tries to burn her to death and he also drives into the clinic and sets it on fire. Samantha survives the fire and her twin girls kill another child at a Halloween party a few years later in Manhattan.
This is one of those movies that tried to improve on Rosemary’s Baby and although some of it is eerie, it’s not really scary and many elements are simply dropped or stuck in for no apparent reason. The novelty was twin Antichrists who were both girls. They, like Adrian, appear only late in the movie and the visual cues for what is happening are off. It’s an interesting attempt to bring science and religion together in horror, but it has trouble understanding the religion it represents. Quite often in horror, and perhaps other genres, a veneer of religion is used without any kind of research into what any tradition actually believes and/or does. The, presumably, Catholicism here is strange. There maybe a scene with the Bible, so I’ll add it to Holy Sequel, in the maybe category.
