Sometimes it takes new blood to bring new life to the movies. Bill Paxton's directorial debut, "Frailty," is a fascinating hybrid of the "Sixth Sense" style nouveau-thriller genre and gritty, axe-in-the-head horror movies. This tale of murder and the battle between the divine and the demonic is a breath of fresh air in a genre of teen-slasher flicks and sub-standard remakes of older horror films.

Late one rainy night at the FBI Headquarters in Houston, a strange man appears, asking for the agent (Powers Boothe) in charge of the investigation of the "God's Hand" murders, an unsolved string of serial killings. The stranger, who identifies himself Fenton Meiks (Mathew McConaughey), says that his brother, Adam, is the killer, and Fenton then begins to tell the bizarre and unbelievable story behind the murder.

In the late '70s, in a small Texas town, Fenton and Adam (played by Matthew O'Leary and Jeremy Sumpter) live with their widowed dad (Bill Paxton), a good-hearted mechanic who loves his sons.

Their idyllic life comes to a halt when Dad has a vision in the middle of the night. He is visited by an angel who tells him that must "destroy" demons who are roaming the earth in human form. Both are initially terrified, but while Adam quickly accepts his dad's story as the truth, Fenton is convinced that his dad is making up the visions and the commands from God. His dad's erratic behavior intensifies as he begins to collect weapons sent down by God and murders a woman with an axe who he believes is a demon. Fenton and Adam are forced to live a nightmarish existence, as their dad forces them to help him bury the bodies and hopes that God will send them a vision so they can help him in his demon-slaying. As Dad says, "this is our job now."

To give away any more of the plot wouldn't be right, as there are plot twists galore. Although the ending is somewhat predictable, the storytelling is highly entertaining, and Paxton's directing is promising. However, the story suffers from the should've-ended-the-movie-five-minutes-ago syndrome, (also known as "Planes, Trains and Automobile" disorder). There is a shot (which I will not mention here) that would have been a great ending, but the movie drags on for another five minutes.

The atmosphere of the movie is intriguing; it mixes the sleepy south with a Gothic ambience that is thoroughly creepy. Also thrown in is the feeling of a horror movie, with shrieking sound effects, dark, tomb-like cellars and demonic visions that recall classic entries in the genre. The violence in the film, which mostly consists of people getting hacked with axes and bludgeoned with pipes, occurs mostly off-screen, and are actually quite tasteful (considering that it involves hacking of necks). Instead of the actual murder, you see the kids' reactions, which gives you a much more tangible sense of their terror and sense of helplessness.

Paxton gives an excellent performance as the disturbed and driven dad. He conveys the absolute belief of a tortured but confident fanatic, and despite his treatment of his children, which is often frightening, he does not fall into the clich