AllMovie

In certain respects, Ticket to Heaven feels like a guttural response to the wretched spate of Canadian tax-shelter horror films from the early '80s, such as My Bloody Valentine and Death Ship -- as if director Ralph L. Thomas felt over-nauseated by the cloying sensationalism and Grand Guignol of Canadian axe murderers and, hungry for some everyday terror, went straight for the central nervous system of the viewer. Even decades later, the film benefits from the shrewd intelligence with which Thomas handles the material. A subject (religious cult indoctrination) that could have become stale movie-of-the-week or afterschool special fodder in less adroit hands attains chilling realism thanks to Thomas's patent refusal to sensationalize and the obvious amount of careful research that went into his co-adaptation (with Anne Cameron) of Josh Freed's novel Moonwebs. It isn't so much Nick Mancuso's four-barreled evocation of David -- the heartbroken young man starved, exhausted, brainwashed, and made catatonic by a Reunification-like cult -- that shines, but the documentary-like accuracy with which Thomas and Cameron cross-section the cult that he plunges into, and the credibility of the young man's earthly salvation at the hands of cult deprogrammer Linc Strunc (R.H. Thomson). As difficult to watch as the film may be, Thomas and Cameron paint one of the most thorough, credible, and terrifying pictures of cultic manipulation to date in a feature film.