When Warner launched their genre label Raw Feed with the intention of bringing a series of horror and thrillers to the DVD market it pleased me to no end to see a major Hollywood studio giving fans some love. But then came the movies. Rest Stop was an awful attempt at a gruesome slasher and Sublime was a mediocre Jacob's Ladder clone, so you can pretty much guess my mindset going into their third production, Believers. Even if the box art touts the fact that Daniel Myrick, one of the makers of The Blair Witch Project, directed it.

Fire department paramedic Dave (Johnny Messner) is a happily married man that's wife is due to have their first child after years of trying. Things couldn't be any better for him. But all that is about to change when he's sent out on a call, along with his partner Vic (Jon Huertas), to the middle of nowhere when a small girl called Libby (Saige Ryan Campbell) calls in because her mother has fainted at a local gas station. While they are desperately trying to revive Libby's mother they're not paying attention to the youngster's warning of "hurry, they're coming" and they find themselves being kidnapped by a group of armed men who has come to drag Libby and her mother back to their top secret underground base.

Seems that they're all members of the Quanta Group, who are basically a cult that is headed-up by "The Teacher" (Daniel Benzali) and are convinced that, because they are all scientists and doctors, they have been chosen to transcend regular human life in an alternate universe and that they need to perform a ritual involving some sort of "formula" within the next few hours before a reign of fire comes from the sky and obliterates all of society.

Brought into the middle of this insanity, and locked into toilet stalls converted into makeshift cells, Dave and Vic have to try and figure out a way to get out of their predicament before the cult members do something brash. At the same time they have to deal with the fact Libby's mother has seemingly come back from the dead, listen to plentiful mumbo-jumbo involving religion and mathematics, and try to keep a grip on the situation - which for Vic turns out to be easier said than done.

Taking its cue from the real life incidents of "Heaven's Gate", where members committed mass suicide in 1997 thinking their souls would be able to latch onto the passing comet Hale-Bopp that they thought contained alien beings within, and Jim Jones' "Peoples Temple", who's members also killed themselves en masse in 1978, Believers takes an intriguing enough premise and doesn't flesh it out enough to give the screenplay any real menace or give us any real feeling of what kind of threat the Quanta's may pose.

Myrick does manage to keep things tight and claustrophobic for a good portion of the first act and also decently captures a pretty good creepy vibe at times, but all the talk about end of days, religion and "undeniable truth" eventually gets tiring. It's obvious these moments are meant to make the viewer see just how "nutty" our Quanta Group members are, but all it really manages to do is make things sketchier than they already are.

Yeah, Believers isn't really the most well written thriller out there. That doesn't mean that it's not watchable, though. The main reason parts of the movie work reasonably well are simply because everything is so sparse. There's also enough of a forward push to events that you're never really given much chance to poke the many holes the plot suffers from until after the credits roll.

Messner is okay in the lead, even if his Dave seems to spend most of the movie calling people "motherf**ker" and acting tough. Huertas' character is the poorest written of the bunch and is taken in a confusing direction as well as having a few weak moments of desperate rambling. In fact, the best performance here comes from eleven-year-old Campbell, who shows enough vulnerability and confused fear to be convincing. Benzali does what he can as the authoritative figure but, like a lot of the cast, isn't given quite enough character development.

As a Raw Feed offering, Believers is much better than their previous efforts. However, held up against others of its type this just comes across as a generally well made and mildly entertaining effort that doesn't demand a repeat viewing and is a bit too sloppily plotted for its own good. (Chris Hartley, 11/5/07)

Directed By: Daniel Myrick.
Written By: Daniel Noah, Daniel Myrick, Julia Fair.

Starring: Johnny Messner, Jon Huertas, Deanna Russo, Saige Ryan Campbell.

Picture Ratio: 1.78:1 Widescreen.

Picture Quality: As this is a purposely drab looking production the transfer here looks okay. It's not pristine, is a little fuzzy at times, and it won't show off your HD television but it's clean and doesn't have any distracting flaws.

Extras: The main batch of extras here are a series of deleted scenes that are meant to flesh-out the story of the movie. It gives more insight into the Quanta Group, it's leader, and the aftermath. There's about twenty minutes total and some of it might've made the movie play a bit better had it been included in the final cut.

On top of that we get a trailer and a commentary track by Myrick and co-writer Fair. It's fairly technical in delivery and there's a handful of quiet moments but it's not completely unlistenable, it's just nothing overly interesting.