Belzebuth starts as an excellent and fairly original occult thriller and ends as a mediocre possession movie. Up until the last thirty minutes it is seriously good. If only it kept up the pace it built in the first two acts I would have loved this film.
The opening is burned into my brain it is so horrifying and well done. It begins with a aged cop losing his son in a tragic murder,
the boy is slaughtered as a baby among other newborns in his hospital bed mere minutes after he is born, sacrificed by a woman driven to kill under demonic influence, who after brutally dispatching the children with a scalpel commits suicide.
Now that is scary, scary stuff. Five years later other murders begin to occur bearing the same signature and the distraught father works with a paranormal investigator to get to the bottom of the case.
Throughout the first two acts there's some truly great stuff, I really can't stress this enough. I want you to get a full picture of the movie without me just saying how it loses it's way at the end and that colour your entire view of it. The entire third act isn't awful but it's not good either, it just doesn't work and feels overly predictable, unnecessarily silly in parts, poorly acted and tacked on.
There's actually a climax two thirds in which would have made
for an excellent and extremely creepy ending. I'll tell you as I doubt you will watch this film. The devil posses a statue of Christ and begins to taunt and offer a deal to the detective. I have never seen that done in a horror movie, it's a really unique way of portraying the devil and makes total sense, Satan using a symbol of the crucifixion and inverting it was a great idea.
But often you'll find when watching horror movies that those involved don't know how to effectively land the plane, even when they've chartered the course perfectly, which is a shame.
This could have been a really good movie but it never recovers once it begins to nose dive in the last forty minutes.
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