THE REMAINING
DIRECTOR: Casey La Scala
CAST: Alexa Vega, Bryan Dechart, Italia Ricci, Shaun Sipos, Johnny Pacar, Liz E Morgan
CLASSIFICATION: 16 HV PPS
RUNNING TIME: 88 minutes
RATING: **
The story begins at the hotel wedding of Skylar (Vega) and Dan (Dechart). The bride’s devout Christian parents would have preferred a church, but Skylar’s not the truest of believers. That’s why she’s going to spend her honeymoon in hell.
The reception has barely started when the end times begin. The souls of the faithful are transported to heaven, leaving a disconcerting array of corpses. Then come the fires, storms, demons and loud noises.
Skylar is informed enough to know what’s happening. She leads Dan and their pals, Allie (Ricci), Jack (Sipos) and Tommy (Pacar), to a library so she can show them the relevant passages in a Bible. There the five 20-somethings pick up Sam (Morgan).
The left-behinders then head to church and along the way, one of them is attacked by some sort of fiend. This leads to a quest for anti-demon medication.
Like so many recent scary movies, The Remaining purports to be shot by its participants. Tommy was recording the wedding on his videocam, and keeps it running after the party goes bad. Later, Sam shoots footage with her phone. But director Casey La Scala doesn’t bother to sustain this premise, adding plenty of sequences that neither Tommy nor Sam could have recorded.
The filmmakers use some special effects and stock footage of disasters, but rely mostly on the typical scaremongers: darkness, shock cuts and loud noises. These work as expected, but La Scala keeps interrupting the dread for sermons on how to be the kind of Christian who gets transported out of here before the bad stuff happens.
There’s a fundamental problem here. The movie relies on the human fear of death, but its message is that dying is a promotion. Says the minister who missed the first shuttle to heaven, the afterlife is “bliss”. So why do the gang of six mourn the ones they’ve lost?
Of course, that question travels from the cinematic into the theological, a trip that didn’t work out very well for The Remaining. – Washington Post
If you liked Left Behind or Tribulation Force, you will like this.