At the start of 2011’s The Reverend, the Devil (Rutger Hauer) pulls up in front of a luxurious hotel.  He gets out of his limo, enters the hotel, and finds God (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) sitting at his desk, surrounded by armed priests.

God asks the Devil what he’s been doing.  The Devil says he’s been traveling the world and tempting men to do evil.  The Devil says that he wants permission to ruin the life of one man who is virtuous and God-fearing, saying that the man will reject his faith as things get worse and worse.  God agrees, as long as the man is not killed….

Does this sound familiar?  Yep, this is yet another adaptation of the Book of Job.  Or, I should say, this film pretends to be an adaptation of the Book of Job.  The nameless Reverend (Stuart Brennan) is a God-fearing man whose life goes downhill after he’s bitten by a vampire.  That said, there’s really not much of a comparison to be made between the Reverend and Job.  Job lost everything, including his land and his family and the majority of his friends.  The Reverend doesn’t really have any friends to lose and he actually gets better at his job after he is turned into a vampire and proceeds to take out his village’s criminal element.

In fact, the entire prologue between God and the Devil feels as if it was tacked on at the last minute.  It really doesn’t connect to the rest of the film and we certainly don’t learn whether it was God or the Devil who won the bet.  Hauer and Radice only appear in that one scene and then they are never heard from again.  That’s a shame because, to be honest, the only reason I watched this movie was for the chance to see Hauer and Radice together.  They were both incredible character actors and tragically, both of them are no longer with us.  Hauer passed away in 2019 and Radice died last year.  Neither one of them looks particularly healthy in the prologue, though it is nice to see the two of them sharing the screen together, albeit for just a few minutes.

As for the rest of the film, it did have potential.  There’s a lot of blood spilled and that’s always a plus when it comes to a vampire movie.  Doug Bradley gives a good performance as the Reverend’s enigmatic superior.  Stuart Brannen is himself likable enough as the Reverend and the scene where he’s first bitten has a kinetic energy to it that briefly gave me some hope for the rest of the film.

Unfortunately, with the exception of the aforementioned scenes, The Reverend is a rather slow movie and one that never succeeds in building up any sort of narrative momentum.  (I guess that’s a polite way of saying that it’s kind of boring.)  As a character, The Reverend is likable but he’s never compelling and the film ends on a rather anticlimactic note.  The film had potential but sadly, most of it went unrealized.