The Devouring

Plenty of horror violence, but most with a dreamlike quality. As a punishment, a father lashes his 10-year-old son to a cross in a field, leaving him overnight in December. Deaths, including a babysitter, a hamster, birds smashed with a baseball bat, a man sealed in a room and left to die, a possessed teen who drowns. Plus mentions of arson (with children as causalities), a serial killer (who drinks the blended blood and brains of a victim), kidnapping, and waking nightmares of giant spiders and blood and organs spewing from someone's mouth. In an evil dream-carnival all sorts of horrors exist: children with no tongues, decapitated heads to be shot at as a game. Some fighting with knives and a bone saw and a scene of a demon baby feeding on its mother's blood and flesh, ripping out through her abdomen.

"Hell," "p---y-boy," "ass," "damn," "asshole," "bitch," "bastard."

To trick their father, Henry says he thinks Reggie and Aaron are high.

Parents need to know that on the ever-escalating horror scale, this falls fairly low in terms of violence and mayhem. Much of the disturbing action takes place in a "fears cape" where nightmares seem to come true. While it's certainly gross and creepy -- axe-wielding psycho clowns, children with their tongues cut off -- the dream quality takes the edge off the threat of danger to the protagonists. The children's mother deserted the family and most of the psychological aspects play on this abandonment. One teen (possessed) boy dies.