Macabre Movie Mausoleum: The Chosen
Happy New Year’s you precocious grave toppers and tombstones. I may be a little late with that but it takes time getting rid of the jolly fat man. Now that we’ve entered a new year… nothing has changed with your mundane lives. Another year has passed, another day has dawned, and here we are ready for another entry into the Macabre Movie Mausoleum.
“The Chosen” (2015)
Director: Ben Jehoshua
Stars: Kian Lawley, Elizabeth Keener, Angelica Chitwood
No this isn’t about people of the Jewish faith, or as they like to be known as ‘The Chosen’. This is about a young uncle trying to save his niece from a demonic possession that he’s partially responsible for. Ready for the confusing part? He and his niece live with his mom, who lives with her parents and brother, but his niece’s mom, his sister, doesn’t live with them because she’s an addict. His mom and her brother are both alcoholics but that’s better than drugs, so the little girl can live with them. Got it? Good, because I’m not repeating that.
Kian Lawley plays Uncle Cameron, and I predict he’ll get his shot at stardom, but we’ll see if he can capitalize on it. Cam accidentally exposes his niece, Angie, to a demon when he inadvertently interrupts a sacrifice. Now with Angie possessed, he learns from the woman he interrupted that he must sacrifice 6 members of Angie’s bloodline to keep her soul from being eternally damned.
As far as plots go, it isn’t the most inventive, but it’s serviceable, and what’s more surprising for a b-level movie, is it’s fairly well acted (even if the most well-known actor Chris Gann who plays Uncle Cameron’s Uncle Joey gave a forgettable performance). I hold child actors to the same standards as their adult counterparts, so typically they don’t meet expectations, but Angie’s role, played by Mykayla Sohn, was kept to a bare minimum with very little dialogue, so whether or not she can act didn’t detract from the overall enjoyment of the movie.
The smartest thing they did was keep the special effects to a minimum and within their budget, so that whatever effects they did use enhanced the movie, except the blood on nanny’s nose, that shit was fake as hell!
All things considered this was a surprising movie that I wasn’t prepared to like as much as I did. The plot and acting combined into what should have been a sleeper hit, but that is more a result of the company not being established enough to push it properly.
You won’t experience anything too terrifying beyond the expected jump scares, but The Chosen is a solid movie that deserves to be talked about more than it has been. And seriously, what’s up with that nun?
For more from Alex Azar head over to azarrising.com
