Despite my distaste for movies that use numerals in place of letters in their titles, I agreed to take a look at Thr3e, which quietly arrives in theaters today. Heralded as a "faith-based thriller," "Christian horror movie," or any other number of vague monikers that indicate some religious content mixed with your usual horror fare.

OK, fair enough, so what do we have here? Well, Thr3e is a kind of riff on your Saw movies and Seven, giving us an unseen psychopath who's stalking our hapless hero Kevin (Marc Blucas), who wants nothing more than to complete his thesis and get out of seminary school. Problem is, he's got something iffy in his past, and the psycho stalker is trying to force Kevin to "confess" his sins... mainly by killing off Kevin's friends and spraying graffiti on his car before blowing it up. Each time he's in touch, he delivers a mysterious set of instructions and a limited time in which to complete them, or else something explodes.

Into this mix comes Jennifer Peters (Justine Waddell), an FBI profiler and oft-stalked writer in her own right, and Samantha (Laura Jordan), a childhood friend of Kevin's. It's with these extra characters that Thr3e starts to get confusing, muddy, and downright nuts. Plot points erupt with each new puzzle, delivered via phone, tape recorder, or note stuck to the refrigerator. All things ultimately start to point to a conclusion that you'll probably see coming from some miles away.

Thr3e is a low-budget production (the CGI explosions in lieu of actual pyrotechnics are especially painful) but it's also an obvious labor of love. Director Robby Henson's last film, The Visitation, was another religion-driven thriller that didn't make much sense nor much of an impact on critics. Henson makes up for this with earnestness and he does coax good performances from his actors. But without a workable script, well, you know what they say about roads paved with good intentions.

Aka Three, 3.



Bye bye.