2009 Christian movie
Bad Movie Rating: 3/5 (Amy: 0/5; Kristen: 0/5; Alicia: 1/5; Fred: .5/5; 0/5; Josh: 4/5)
Rating: 4/20
Plot: A "heavy Hispanic John Larroquete" (not my description) raises his daughter on his own following his wife's death-by-trucker. All she wants to do is ballet, but leukemia gets in the way. God decides to use her as a tool to win over non-believers.
And I'm so confused by the metaphor. Is this calling religion a disease? Because that's what it seems to be doing. And I'm not sure why God allows these movies to be made. Fred probably said it best when he asked, "If there's a God, why is this movie not watchable?" Satan had to have been involved in the production of this movie because there is no way this movie is going to win over people to Christianity. In fact, I could see it doing the opposite. I can imagine a person who's been going to church for thirty years saying, "Hold on a second. I'm not sure I want to be a part of an organization that would support something like this!"
I have no idea what the message is supposed to even be here. God uses you, and then you die underneath a Christmas tree? Sorry. That's a spoiler, but you're probably not going to see this anyway. And if you do, you'll thank me for being warned about the death scene. There's spilled eggnog and abysmal acting, and I doubt leukemia has ever been funnier than it is at that moment. You'll want to know it's coming or else you'll end up watching it and being afflicted with stigmata.
You know, I'm sure writer/director/supporting actor Greg Robbins (who played "Motel Customer" in Terminator, by the way) has actually interacted with other human beings. And I just don't understand how somebody who has interacted with human beings can write some of the scenes in this. Take the scene where a high school thug chases after the girl with leukemia, and then, after some of his pals--one armed with a crowbar--joins him, proceeds to. . .well, I'm not sure what they do. The entire scene makes no sense at all. The conversations the high schoolers have throughout this seem like they were written by somebody who read Archie comics while on acid. The dialogue gets especially disgusting every time they talk about the dead mom. It's sentimentality that would cause executives at the Hallmark Channel to lose their lunch. Throw in the weird way the mother is killed off in the first scene (a sequence that gives truckers a bad name), a pastor who announces that he's getting "pissed off," and one of the clumsiest death scenes you're likely to see, and you're going to assume Greg Robbins was raised like Kasper Hauser and didn't emerge from his basement until he was in his twenties.
This movie's got a devil, but he sort of just lurks around with some of those weird contacts you can buy at a place like Hot Topic. He's about the least charismatic Beelzebub I've ever seen in a movie. He's more interesting when he shape-shifts into Leukemia Girl's ballet instructor or, my personal favorite, Ralph the janitor, a Gomer Pyle-esque character who stares right into the camera and quite possibly your soul once his scene has ended. He's played by Gary Crain who hasn't been in any other movies yet but is more than likely on his way to greatness.
You know what's scarier than the devil? The music in this. I don't know where they found the woman who belts out a couple songs in this, but she made my eardrums bleed. Josh wondered if she was yodeling at one point.
One of us found out that this had a budget of 155,000 dollars. I know some of that was spent on a personalized license plate that said "C Me Danc" on it. I know some of it had to be spent on contact lenses to make the devil more menacing. There's an explosion and a car on fire, so maybe they spent some money on that. That explosion, by the way, took place at night (the maleficent truck driver scene) while the firemen are filmed at the scene with the burning car during the day. Maybe they should have paid a guy a couple bucks to watch for continuity errors instead of buying contacts. 155,000 isn't a ton of money or anything, but when you think about what a church could do with that much cash instead of what these people did, it makes you a little sad. And I'm sure it disappoints Jesus.
There might be a special place in hell for the people running Uplifting Entertainment.
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