Movie:
A town called 'Haven', located in the religiously fanatic area of Louisiana, is not quite living up to the essentials of it's name. When a little boy dies in a mysterious way, his death triggers a chain of events that resemble the plaques from the almighty Bible.

Katherine Winter is an ex-missionary and has lost all faith in God since her family was murdered in Soedan. She is requested to come up with scientific explanation for a river with nothing but red water and heeps of dead fish since the boy was found dead in it. During her investigation, more plague-like events occur and it becomes difficult to find non-spiritual answers for all of them.

As time goes by, it seems there is more than meets the eye in 'Haven' ... and Katherine might need to restore her faith in God.
 
Sound and Vision:
Sound-wise for The Reaping we have a bit of a win-lose situation. While the surround sound itself is nice and balanced throughout the whole movie, the volume levels are way out of control during suspension/action scenes. At some points I even felt the normal dialogues were impacted by this phenomenon.
Nothing more disturbing than having to grab the surround remote and tune down the volume during a tense moment ...

In the visuals department I also have some mixed feelings about this HD-version. While close-ups of objects are so detailed you can almost feel the details with your fingertips all the way from your lazy couch, at times the first part of the movie seems to apply some bad compression to the faces. Also notable were a couple of serious macro-blocking issues, and some judder that apparantly is copied from the normal DVD version.
Luckily the second part of the film is mainly outdoors, where quality seems to improve vastly over the first part.
 
Extras:
Note : all the extras are in 480i or 480p instead of 1080p.

Science of the 10 plagues : a search for scientific explanations

The actors : comments by the cast on the shooting of the movie

A place called Haven

The Reaping (the 7th plague) : scary bugs

The AnnSophia story : a short tale written by the young girl herself

 
Conclusion:
While this movie categories under 'horror', it's not one that has massive amounts of gore and blood. Consider it more of hardcore thriller with some nice suspense moments and a decent plot.

Having no expectations at all (apart from the picture quality since this was the first HD-DVD I popped into my brandnew player) I enjoyed the movie, but was not blown away by it.

Hilary Swank puts down a nice performance and I might add looks quite beautifull doing that :)

Not really important, but still a big no-no for me personally, is the fact that the extras on an HD-DVD release are not HD at all.