A Thief in the Night Part 3 picks up where A Distant Thunder left off, with Patty (Patty Dunning) set to be executed for not accepting the mark of the beast during the Tribulation.
It must be said that this opening sequence is something else. Patty is led to the guillotine for her crimes and is given a heavenly stay of execution when God causes an earthquake to bring her sentencing to a halt. You would think that alone would make her profess her belief in God, but when she fails to renounce the devil in a timely manner… well… Let’s just say it doesn’t end well.
I guess I’m kind of spoiling things when I say this is easily the best part of the movie. Heck, this is probably the best scene in the whole series. It’s well worth watching this scene based on its own merits and shows that director Donald W. Thompson had a flair for the dramatic. It’s just a shame that it all goes into the toilet after that.
The focus then shifts to David (William Wellman, Jr.), a freedom fighter who’s infiltrated “Unite”, the foundation of evil. His big plan is to… uh… make a fake hand stamp so everybody thinks he has “the mark of the beast”. However, he spends most of his time in a barn hanging out with the preacher from other movies. This guy has a big mural of the timeline of the Tribulation and overexplains Biblical prophecies to David (and the audience) and says things like, “This is not God’s temper tantrum!” Eventually, God rains plague after plague upon man.
After the cool opening guillotine scene, the film slows to a freaking crawl. Other attempts at suspense are downright laughable. The grocery store sequence is particularly cheesy, and the attack of the giant locust (although all we see is its stinger) is lame. These goofy moments unfortunately are not enough to carry it over the many dull patches.
AKA: A Thief in the Night 3: Image of the Beast.
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