End of the Line (2007)

Once when I was seven or eight years old, I was playing together with my best friend Caroline in her family's apartment. She had a guinea pig I remember, and we used to play with that creature a lot. Now, this was many years ago of course, and my memories of Caroline is getting blurrier and blurrier. But this time will forever be printed into my mind. When we sat there on the floor, a man entered the room. His eyes where blank and he started at us. We we're scared of course, and the only thing I remember him saying was: "You're gonna go to heaven now...". We ran out, to our mothers who was in a nearby building, to safety. This could be one of the reasons I've become such a proud atheist, and probably also the strongest reason for being so affected by Maurice Devereaux's End of the Line. 

Karen (Ilona Elkin) is a doctor on her way home after a chaotic day at work. The world seems to go crazy, and the nut-jobs are even more at the hospital than ever. One of her patients also take suicide earlier that day, which don't make anyone happier. On the train strange things start to happen, and after the train stops in one of the tunnels she and her new friend, Mike (Nicolas Wright), sense that something is very wrong. At the same time, all over the city (maybe the country or the world), all the members of a sect gets a message on their beeper: The end is near, try to "save" as many as possible. With saving, it means that they should kill everyone that's not a believer so god can save them before the demons, Satan, arrives again. Now Karen and Mike, together with other survivors, has to fight their way through the dark tunnels, empty trains and watch out for murderous sect-members in every corner!

Wow, this is the second time I've seen this movie and it's a masterpiece. It's low budget, but still... fuck, it looks amazing and is one of those movies that actually involves you. The characters are very well written, even if they just are fuck-ups. These are flesh and blood, both alive and dead - if you get my meaning. Most important, the growing relationship between Karen and Mike works, and you believe in how they react to each other - and even hoping that they will find each other sooner or later. I'm sure they did that by the way, if you put the details together and realize that there's not Armageddon, just the insane ideas of a Christian sect. But even Satan is not for real, I'm sure you will be pleased with the horror and gore that this movie delivers. It never becomes a splatter movie like Deveraux earlier movie, Slashers), but has strong and nasty kills with a couple of very graphic and bloody effects. Here it feels more realistic, for example it's not easy to chop of someones head - and it's proven in this movie. The gore reminded my of the Italian horror flicks of the seventies, where gruesome murders often stayed gruesome, and not became cartoonish. 

I've seen a lot of the evil things that religion can do, and somehow I think whats happening is in this movie isn't that unrealistic. People blame problems, "sin", disasters and everything else on Mr Satan or God Almighty, and decides that they are the ones to order non-religious Christians how to live. In this movie the Christian takes upon themselves to save people by killing - which has been done before in history - but never in this way. Still, we have attacks and murders in the name of who's god it is just that day, from Catholic's hiding their problems with pedophilia inside the church, to Islamic fundamentalists crashing airplanes into World Trade Center. Everything in the name of their god and their religion. 

This makes End of the Line even more powerful, and mixes gore and traditional horror, with something very true - and very real.