It’s Devil Week over at the IPCs  because everyone needs more devil in their lives, right? Starting yesterday, there’ll be five days worth of movies with the word devil in the title that may or may not have to do with the devil at all! (Or in this case, not necessarily in the title but ya know…E said it was totes cool!) And so I present our He Said/She Said of I’M NOT JESUS MOMMY:

HE SAID:

I’ve never been a real big fan of “The Omen” style Antichrist movies, probably because I was bred into a religious environment growing up, and, as a  Sagittarius, I can’t really take it when people tell me what to do and how to think and what’s trendy and what to watch and what to do and everything else. The “Sag” is a free spirit who makes his (her) own decisions by trying it out himself (herself) before making the decision of like or dislike or hang on to or get rid of. So, here we have an Apocalypse movie, via “The Rapture” that’s really (thankfully) not too preachy but, honestly, suffers from WAY too much slowness, boredom and, I do hate it, but not too much budget.  With “Amber Lake“, those folks showed us how to make a really GOOD movie with no money. Here, the acting is pretty bad from everyone, but it’s not like I just hired my neighbor from across the street to do the co-star role for 200 bucks, I think it’s just a lack of experience. I am always appreciative that a movie gets made (who knows if I’ll ever even finish my screenplay and try), much less gets picked up and  distributed, but this was just kind of too slow. I mean, I think they really tried, but, for real, I played 20 rounds of Words With Friends during the loooooong musical interludes because I was not interested, I thought about how I might review this because I think they had a good idea which could have been much better with some more funding, I thought about how (in no way ever) I could give some money for a better remake and, for those of you who look at this, I thought about how I had the shot in my back today and I could finally sit comfortably, and I thought about how I have to go to work tomorrow. Anyway, this is boring and slow and has several record-playing pauses that dim any excitement that might be brewing, BUT – it’s a good story, if you don’t mind a Christian style End-of-Days Rapture thing.

So – a very large chested woman named Bridget McGrath plays a very successful fertility doctor named Kimberly Gabriel who can’t have kids of her own. She is opted in to a U.S. Army experiment where an actor named Charles Hubbell (Dr. Gibson) has finally figured out how to clone a human embryo. Despite her initial reservations, she decides to go along with the experiments on illegal Mexican aliens as hosts and goes ahead and self-inseminates herself with one of the clone-embryos. Sure enough, it takes (but none of the others do) and eventually she Cesarean-style has a baby she names David (complete with an upside down cross indention on his baby-head). Shortly after that, we cut to seven years later, the Earth is in famine, war and death (Revelations), everyone seems to have “the mark of the beast”, the U.S. is in some sort of Ice Age and (I think) the Mexican government is controlling everything from food to water and bread and there is no gas or electricity. Kim and her son David are living alone in a cold, cold apartment and he Doctor (Hubbell) has gone bat-shit religious, preaching (and praying) constantly to his live-in sister and her daughter.

I’ll stop here, because this is a decent (but very slow) movie and I shouldn’t spoil it, but this could be much better. Let’s ax the record playing, the CGI cold breath, the way, WAY too many close-up shots, the irritating preaching by Hubbell, the clothes-with-no-bodies-Rapture business and make this into something exciting that’s not “Vanishing on 7th Street“. To me it’s “to each their own” and I have long read into the dogma of Christianity (and many other religions) and I get it, but how about someone funds something that is actually scary about the Apocalypse, which is a fearful thought, whichever “ism” you believe in. It’s been a LONGtime since I saw it with my friend Dave M, but I think my favorite of these types of things is “The Prophecy” with none other than my main man, Christopher Walken.

SHE SAID:

No, no you are NOT Jesus because I’m fairly certain Jesus would’ve had the common courtesy to put a comma in that freaking title.  Seriously.  That’s the first thing that’s wrong with I’m Not Jesus Mommy but never fear, that’s not the only thing that’s wrong here, trust me.  There’s lots more to come!

The story starts out with a woman.  She’s a cancer survivor but unfortunately the cancer left her unable to conceive.  She has a husband who seems pretty sweet and loving – I mean they spend the first 20 minutes of the movie dancing around the kitchen and drinking wine and snuggling.  In between the lovey-dovey, there are shots of the woman (Kimberly, btw) being interviewed because she is also a fertility doctor (irony!), then going to a top super secret meeting with military personnel, then getting all furious because at this top super secret meeting she learns that these people are cloning, then after that she decides to take a job with them.  Hey, minds can be changed in the blink of an eye.

Roger is the lead doctor of this top super secret cloning project which seems to mostly consist of catching illegal immigrants and offering them the chance to become a permanent resident if they agree to be implanted and carry a baby to term.  The embryos that aren’t implanted are destroyed which agonizes Kimberly.  So what does she do?  She grabs the first one she sees and impregnates herself, of course!  No learning anything about the embryo or where it came from or any characteristics of it, nope, just point and shoot with the turkey baster.  She’s totes excited about this and runs home to tell her husband who becomes furious.  Why?  Because she didn’t ask him and this wasn’t just her decision.  This was an odd turn of events to me because it’s made pretty apparent before hand that Kimberly really really wants a baby and if you didn’t want a baby, Mr. Husband, pretty sure you should’ve said something like, AGES ago.  *shakes head, rolls eyes*  Mr. Husband runs off in a rage and immediately gets into a car wreck where his car is flipped over.  Then another car comes along a minute later and smashes into him.  Oh well.

Baby is born (which is pretty epic because all the other embryos implanted were still-born), baby is baptized.  And suddenly, it’s 7 years later and the world has gone crazy.  Mexico has closed off its borders and built a wall to discourage US and Canadian citizens from crossing into their land.  People are being fed government rations and starving.  There’s barely any electricity or heat and all that’s on the telly are the government rules (curfews, punishment for not obeying the rules).  Life pretty much sucks.

I’m sorry, mommy, I didn’t mean to start the apocalypse.

Now, remember Roger, the cloning guru?  Well, he’s gone extremely religious.  He’s somewhere between fanatic and extremist.  I mean, he’s smothering people in the name of love and all that (just a note – one of the people he smothers is an adorable little child so if that sort of thing bothers you, for sure never watch this one).  And baby?  Well, his name’s David and he has an imaginary friend named Kuddles and his mommy is dying and he wants to go to Mexico.  There’s a lot of “yada, yada, government is bad, yada, yada, mommy is dying, yada, yada” exposition and then suddenly we’re at the end of this thing without anything really having happened.  I will tell you this much about the end.  The whole “I’m not Jesus” thing comes about from David having been cloned from blood found on the Shroud of Turin.  Yep, he’s supposed to be a Jesus clone.

So what are my issues here?  How about a handy little list?

1.  The acting is bad.  Kimberly is completely monotone.  “My baby!” carries as much weight here as “I took out the garbage.” It’s entirely distracting.

2.  This movie has no idea what it wants to be about.  It starts off being about the dangers of cloning, then suddenly it turns into a statement about immigration, THEN it goes all religious and finally at the very end, it’s about cloning again.  Now if they had picked just one of these (hell, even two) it would’ve made for a much more linear narrative but instead we get a jumble that doesn’t know what it wants to be preaching about.

3.  The description I read about the movie before I watched states that “odd things happen when David is around”.  NOTHING odd happens when David is around except that he’s a weird kid that wants to bring his mom back to life when she dies.  And there’s one instance where Kuddles seems to “come to life”, so to speak.

4.  We see people getting killed and then a minute later, all that’s left of them is their clothing.  So we seem to have the Rapture going on but why do they need to die first for this to happen?  Admittedly, I haven’t gone to church in awhile but my understanding is that you can just be raptured without being killed first.

5.  Why did the world suddenly go all Big Brother crazy?  There is NO indication of this happening prior to the title card “7 Years Later”.  Did cloning make this happen, is that what we’re supposed to surmise?  This plot point seemed to come totally out of left field.

So much wrong when this could’ve been so much of a right.  *sighs*