Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Frailty

(2002)

Here we get off to a cracking good start, and waste it all in an outrageous ending. Bill Paxton (who also directed) lives in the fictional (I’m happy to say) town of Meat, Texas, with his two young sons. All is well until one night he goes off the rails and plunges off the trestle of sanity into the dark river of religion. An angel has spoken to him, and his mission in life is now to kill demons. He has a list of seven of them, who will look just like humans, but be actual tools of Satan. And he wants his boys to help. The older one doesn’t buy this shit, but the younger one does. Soon he is butchering people in the shed behind the house while the boys watch and help him bury the bodies.
This is all told in flashback by Matthew McConaughey as one of the boys, grown up, to FBI agent Powers Booth. Who is naturally skeptical but begins to believe the story. So now you, as well as I, are waiting for the twist ending, right? Something is always not as it seems in these movies. I had come up with several possibilities, and could have lived with several others that I didn’t think of. Instead we get …
(SPOILER WARNING) … an ending so outrageous, so objectionable, that I wished once more that I was really, really rich so I could empty a pistol into the TV set and then have the staff set up a new one. The people being killed really were demons. God really did make his killers invisible while they were kidnapping the demons. God even fucked up a videotape of one of the boys! Oh, man. I can tolerate a supernatural reveal in a movie, but not God. Not serial killers who turn out to be doing good. Fuck this shit!