{"id":8127,"date":"2024-11-11T23:24:19","date_gmt":"2024-11-12T04:24:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=8127"},"modified":"2024-11-11T23:24:19","modified_gmt":"2024-11-12T04:24:19","slug":"the-jesus-freak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/11\/11\/the-jesus-freak\/","title":{"rendered":"The Jesus Freak"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Jesus Freak <\/strong>(2017)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Carl Jackson Motion Pictures Studios\/Comedy-Drama\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 90 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 No MPAA rating (thematic elements)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Carl Jackson\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Carl Jackson and Joseph Polk\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Edwin L. Williams II\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: August\u00a0 25, 2017 (Philadelphia, PA)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Crystal Cameron, Darret Hart, Abby Joy, Carl Jackson, Dalon Collins, Carolina Bradley, Taylor Donald, Nicole Holt, Timothy Aydelott.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: N\/A<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: NO STARS!!!<\/p>\n

\u00a0I missed a Q&A session with the director of Carl Jackson\u2019s The Jesus Freak<\/strong> by a day. Had I been there, I would have asked how he managed to get respectable theaters to show his movie despite it being incompetent in every single way. It\u2019s easily one of the worst movies I\u2019ve ever sat through.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I\u2019m not even sure words can adequately describe the excruciating experience of watching The Jesus Freak<\/strong>. I\u2019m sure going to try though. It\u2019s like watching a movie made by the worst student in film school. It wouldn\u2019t even get an F; the student would be advised to consider another career before being kicked out. The Jesus Freak<\/strong> is clearly a DIY project. Jackson financed and distributed it himself. It\u2019s the only way he could get it out there; no studio would have touched it with a pole of any length.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The Jesus Freak<\/strong> begins in a most peculiar way. There\u2019s a trailer for another one of his films 2013\u2019s Strong Black Woman (never heard of it). Then there\u2019s a short clip showing two men telling a club DJ to step up his game. It then turns into a dance number. None of it has anything to do with the movie which deals with a church group going to Las Vegas to save souls. What better place to find sinners than Sin City, right? It turns out to be a bad idea as temptation rears its ugly head and a couple of them succumb to it. The youth pastor (Aydelott) loses a lot of money gambling. Kirsten Cooper (Cameron), the \u201cFirst Lady\u201d* of the church, sleeps with a woman she meets at a bar. It causes even more problems in her already troubled marriage to head pastor Ed (Hart) who committed adultery a few years earlier.<\/p>\n

\u00a0There\u2019s more drama. Kirsten\u2019s assistant Tammy (Joy) wants to have a baby so bad, she deceived her husband Ricardo (Jackson) about birth control. She stopped taking the pill a few months ago and is now pregnant. He\u2019s not happy. Also, church member Darren (Collins) falls in love with Diamond (Bradley), a girl he meets in Vegas.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Now let\u2019s jump to the end of The Jesus Freak<\/strong> which isn\u2019t really the end. It closes with a wedding scene during which a pregnant character\u2019s water predictably breaks just as the celebration gets underway. As the end credits roll, the main actors lip sync and dance to some rap song. That\u2019s followed by several minutes of extra pick-up shots of exteriors. All told, the \u201cend\u201d is dragged out for like ten minutes. I call it prolonging torture.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I\u2019ve seen small micro-budgeted independent films that were good- e.g. Stranger Than Paradise, Straight Out of Brooklyn, El Mariachi and Clerks. Then I\u2019ve seen some that are just plain awful like The Jesus Freak<\/strong>. It takes incompetence to a whole new level. This movie is vile. The production values are among the worst I\u2019ve ever seen. It looks cheap and shoddy. It\u2019s poorly made and badly put together. It\u2019s sloppily edited. Many times you hear characters speaking while other characters are on-screen. Much of the time it sounds like the dialogue was re-recorded and looped in. The score, which often drowns out the dialogue, is overbearing. The music in the dramatic scenes sounds like it comes from a 1940s melodrama, the kind normally shown late nights on Turner Classic Movies.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The acting is God-awful. Not a single performance rings true. The line readings sound over-rehearsed. I\u2019m wondering if Jackson just recruited people from his church and handed them scripts to memorize. There\u2019s no evidence of talent anywhere in The Jesus Freak<\/strong>. That goes for the people behind the camera as well. The screenplay is a jumble of faith-testing dilemmas and hackneyed melodrama. It\u2019s all over the place. At some point, the focus shifts to Pastor Ed. At a meeting with the bishop, he\u2019s called out on his pride and arrogance before being asked to step down. I just realized that I don\u2019t even know what religion the characters are. I\u2019m going to guess Baptist because it takes place in Texas, but don\u2019t hold me to it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I absolutely loathed The Jesus Freak<\/strong>. I hated it with every fiber of my being. It\u2019s not a movie, it\u2019s a test of one\u2019s patience. I thought about walking out about a dozen times. It\u2019s absolutely unwatchable! I still can\u2019t believe it got booked in regular theaters. I saw it an arthouse theater that normally shows quality films. Once in a while, they get one that isn\u2019t very good. Very seldom do they get something as horrible as The Jesus Freak<\/strong>. The last one I can think of is 1993\u2019s Tokyo Decadence. It\u2019s the only time I ever saw an apology from theater management posted at the entrance. They should do the same with this one. I\u2019ll go one step further. Jackson should personally call everybody who paid to see it and offer a full refund (including parking and popcorn) by way of an apology. Yes, it\u2019s really that bad.<\/p>\n

*= the head pastor\u2019s wife\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Jesus Freak (2017)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Carl Jackson Motion Pictures Studios\/Comedy-Drama\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 90 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 No MPAA rating (thematic elements)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Carl Jackson\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Carl Jackson and Joseph Polk\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Edwin L. Williams II\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: August\u00a0 25, 2017 (Philadelphia, PA)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Crystal Cameron, Darret Hart, Abby Joy, Carl Jackson, Dalon Collins, Carolina Bradley, Taylor Donald, Nicole Holt, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8288,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dramas","category-this-sucks-so-bad"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/The-Jesus-Freak-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8127"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8290,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8127\/revisions\/8290"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}