APPRENTICE TO MURDER
Possibly, the most inappropriate box art ever
Oh, man - get a load of this box art. A sinister, cloaked figure wielding a Satanic-looking talisman stands above a woman, lying surrounded by candles on an altar, a skull at her feet, with red curtains behind them. The tag line: "Seduced by Satan, obsessed with the occult, he is trapped in a web of mayhem and murder."
Okay, now here's the REAL scoop on the movie. Chad Lowe (far less annoying than usual) stars as Billy, a young man in rural 1927 Pennsylvania with an alcoholic father who turns to the local healer (played by Donald Sutherland) for help with this problem. When the healer's skills are put to successful use, Billy is taken under his wing and taught to read, asked to draw hexagrams used in warding off hexes, and do Bible readings. It's Billy's relationship with the healer that holds off his desire to run away to Philadelphia with his new girlfriend (Mia Sara). Oh yeah - and some creepy-looking guy in a cloak keeps popping up and looking at Billy kinda funny. Soon enough a hex is placed on the town, killing the livestock, and Billy and the healer try to get to the bottom of things.
None of this sounds like much of a setup for a horror movie, and despite some horror-ish moments (like when one guy spews fire from his mouth!), this is certainly not the horror flick promised by the lurid cover.
Inspired by a true story (but like with Fargo, there's a disclaimer at the end emphatically stating that nothing in this movie is meant to resemble any actual events or persons), I keep reading about how Sutherland's character is a corrupting influence on Billy, but I barely see that at all. Sutherland's actually quite good here (it's nice to be reminded of what he's capable of after he embarassed himself in Virus), but it's as a mostly sympathetic individual. If he's trying to be sinister, he's not doing a very good job.
The ending might just explain how everything might work out with Sutherland as the villain, but jeez, that calls for some awfully convenient hallucinations from Billy.
Apprentice to Murder is not a bad movie at all, but it's not a very good one either, and being misled by the box art doesn't exactly help. If you dig Donald Sutherland, you might want to give it a look.
A Canadian production, filmed in Norway.