THE BELIEVERS (1987) Won't make a believer out of anybody If Hollywood is run by a bunch of Jesus-hating liberals, where's the movie about psychotic sects of dastardly Christians sacrificing children? Yet another one of a long line of many movies that seemed cool to me when I was a teenager, and now, not so much, The Believers is essentially an evil voodoo cult movie, though its scary religion is something called Santeria, which looks a lot like voodoo. As is typical of movies like this, we are painstakingly told that the religion is usually a positive thing in its followers' lives and not the blood-and-dead-goats spookiness that every other minute of the movie is trying to show it as. No points for guessing that the ultimate voodoo (dang, Santeria) villains in this movie are not heavily accented immigrants, but in fact mostly white rich people. The Believers opens with a cruel and unnecessary sequence where the wife of a police psychiatrist (Martin Sheen) electrocutes herself to death. I don't mind that it's cruel, but it is definitely unnecessary; the scene after it is set in Africa, and even though we're not told this and don't find out until the movie's almost over, it's a flashback to forty years earlier. Then we move back to the present day, all the while assuming we'd never left. Sheen moves to New York with his kid, who bounces around between complete idiocy (running out into traffic), cloying sentimentality (calling his dad's girlfriend "Mom"), and just plain spazziness. He gets involved with landlady Helen Shaver (who, being the pretty one, must suffer a disfiguring and ironic fate) and gets tangled up with a voo...crap, Santaria cult headed up by a white-eyed black guy (Malick Bowens) who uses the Jedi Mind Trick to get by airport security. We know they're bad, like really bad, because they're responsible for a couple of gruesome child sacrifices, surrounded by a whole bunch of gruesome goat, chicken and cat sacrifices, often garnished with heaps of fruits and vegetables and half-burnt candles, which is just left there like litter. What a waste of perfectly good food; like any god needs it more than his worshippers. Jimmy Smits is also here as a cop who found out more than he wanted to and is paying a terrible price for it, and Robert Loggia as a more senior cop who goes through much the same. People we thought were nice people turn out to be villains and then have attacks of conscience for no apparent reason and then become victims in the span of a couple of minutes. Inevitably, there's a climax in a big industrial warehouse where heroes and villans do battle at great heights over an assortment of upward-pointing things. Funny that a movie that tries so hard to be racially and culturally sensitive would give the black man a blowgun. BACK TO THE B's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE