Zitskrieg the Believers

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

An innocent child possessed by the devil. A shark with a strange taste for shallow waters (and careless swimmers). An actor willing to sell his soul in exchange for a decent role. A good horror movie can be outlined in a sentence.

The Believers, a movie doing its best to defy description at any length, has some potential in this regard. It posits a Caribbean voodoo cult that offers unlimited worldly power to people willing to sacrifice their young sons in its rituals. And it brings a newly widowed father (Martin Sheen) and his son (Harley Cross) into menacing proximity with the evildoers. A well-made horror film would focus tightly on the son's menaced innocence and force us to share the father's fears as the portents of doom gather about him, his ferocity when at last he must defend his child.

But Mark Frost's script is abuzz with distractions, and John Schlesinger's direction is puttery and fussy. That boldness of style and pace that can distract the audience from the improbabilities always inherent in this genre is quite beyond him. It is rather late in the picture before the filmmakers briefly get their act together. For no very good reason, the meanies decide to visit upon the heroine, Helen Shaver, a humongous zit. Far beyond the curative powers of even the large-economy-size Clearasil, this ever growing pimple symbolizes the worst social nightmares of the adolescents who are the prime audience for occult nonsense, especially since -- eeyuu! -- popping it turns out to be worse than living with it. The sequence is simply and efficiently done, and the film's prevailing mood -- a hopeless desire to pat everything into plausibility -- is abandoned. If The Believers could have done for father love what it does for acne anxiety, its creators might have had something here.