This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Bible Town. It's the last movie on the So Bad It's Horrible List from WowNow Entertainment, creators of the Finding Jesus and Fishtales series, Zoo Wars, and Dia of the Dead.
- So, here's the plot. There's three kids who seem to have this strange condition that causes them to look up all the time with their cross-eyed eyes, talk without having their lips match what they're saying, and gesticulate wildly. They're on a hot air balloon traveling to a place called Bible Town, where all you have to do is ask anyone and they'll tell you any Bible story. Then they get there and do exactly that.
- The Bible stories basically consist of each specific Bible story being read verbatim from the Bible. They don't edit them, even if just for coherence. The story of Noah's Ark even mentions the fact that all the animals are to be included two by two, except when Noah's supposed to round up seven of some species. The actual reading is emotionless, by someone who's mastered how to pronounce words like "Shant" or "Capernaum" but not to comprehend the words they're reading.
- The video basically consists of clip-art that may or may not actually be related to the story at hand animated Ken Burns-style.
- Naturally, what makes sense for Ken Burns doesn't make sense for this story. For instance, instead of something like a photo of Ulysses Grant playing over Jason Robards reading from a letter by Grant, it's something like the Massacre of the Innocents being related over a drawing of a bunch of sunflowers. And this isn't a sort of relax-o-vision so we don't have to deal with kids watching thousands of babies getting slaughtered; it's rare for any image to directly relate to what's being told.
- They tell of the creation of the world, and it looks like the world's already been created the whole time and God didn't have to do anything. Or they tell about Jesus' baptism and seem to go out of their way to go use clip art from any story from the Gospel except for that story.
- Some stories, however, seem to have some mild animation. And when I say mild animation, I mean that they have some screensaver-level animations of what look like nature. They're usually the most tolerable-looking parts, but not only do they not even relate to what's being said at all, but it's usually at these parts where the stories start to just meld into each other.
- It's so lazy that I start to find myself nostalgic for the complexities of shit like Finding Jesus. Say what you will about that (and I've covered two movies' worth of that shit), but at least they had fucking plots, as infantile as they were. At least you learned a few fish facts from the whole deal, even if the animation immediately contradicted said facts. And I don't care what shitty Bible videos your parents made you watch, they were still better than this.
- I probably would have gone into more detail about what I saw, but I accidentally deleted my first draft of this post.
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.