OxfordPress.com

Grade:

Verdict: A smart, creepy low-key chiller.

Details: Starring Bill Paxton (left) and Matthew McConaughey Directed by Paxton. Rated R for violence. One hour and forty minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Imagine “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” from Leatherface's point of view and you'll have some idea of one aspect of “Frailty,” a creepy little exercise in Southern Gothic directed by and starring Bill Paxton.

It begins at a Dallas FBI office, where agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe), working late, is interrupted by a man who introduces himself as Fenton Meiks (Matthew McConaughey). There's something a little off about Meiks, but Doyle listens up when he claims to know the identity of a serial killer who calls himself God's Hand. Meiks says it's his brother Adam and, what's more, he can prove it.

Flash back to 1979, to the little Texas town where 12-year-old Fenton (Matt O'Leary) and his young brother Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) live with their father (Paxton), a decent, God-fearing widower who works as a mechanic. Everything is pretty normal around the Meiks house. The brothers bicker over whether to see “The Warriors” or “Meatballs” and Dad — that's the only name he's given — says grace before supper every evening.

Then one night Dad walks into the boys' room and tells them he just talked with God. The end of the world is near, God told him, and Satan is unleashing his demons on earth in human form. God wants the Meiks to be his demon-slayers. God even has a list. “We can see demons while other people can't,” Dad explains.

Armed with his “magical weapons” — an ax and some gardening gloves — Dad starts doing God's work. Adam goes with the program from the start; Fenton's reaction is, first, disbelieving (Dad's gone loony), then aghast (Dad just chopped up that woman), then terrified (what's Dad going to do if I don't play along?), then resolute (Dad's gone loony and I ain't killing people.)

What does it all mean? One crafty little warning flag the movie raises is that the first victim is a nurse and the second is a doctor, who, Dad says, “likes to hurt little children.” Are we edging into Eric Rudolph territory?

Though he's well known for his roles in “Twister” and “Titanic," this is Paxton's directorial debut and it's quite impressive. He gives "Frailty" a spare, low-budget feel and an unadorned grisliness reminiscent of those classic splatter flicks from the '70s, full of murderous rednecks living just off the main road. But there's another dimension here that suggests the ominous Bible-thumping zeal of Robert Mitchum in "Night of the Hunter.”

Paxton's religious fervor is ever bit as resolute but it manifests itself in a bland, black-comedy calm. Dad is the same kind of strict but loving father as Fess Parker in “Old Yeller” or Stephen Collins in “Seventh Heaven” — except he's apparently insane. Instructing his boys in how to kill a demon, he could be Pa Walton talking to John-Boy. “Do it like I showed you,” Dad says patiently. “The neck is first.”

The two young actors are wonderfully natural and it's good to see Boothe, a criminally underused actor. McConaughey is more focused and forceful than he's been in most of his high-profile Hollywood pictures.

There's slight sag about two-thirds of the way through when you start to wonder how many ax murders is too many ax murders in a movie about an ax murderer. But the final twist — it's almost as good as the one in “The Sixth Sense” — more than makes up for it.

Combining down-home demon-hunting with backwoods Grand Guignol, "Frailty" isn't a showy film. However, by the time it's over, it's shown you a lot about the appeal of movies that seem to have crawled out from under a rock. That's meant as a compliment.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, (none)