The Blessed Ones, 2016.
Written and Directed by Patrick O’Bell.
Starring Dave Vescio, Andy Gates, and Tamzin Brown.
SYNOPSIS:
The Blessed Ones shadows a tightly knit cult hiding in a remote desert enclave as they prepare for the impending apocalypse. Two dissenters try to escape through the vast desert wasteland as the cult embarks on a mass suicide pact.
First thing’s first: The Blessed Ones is a bad movie. By this I don’t mean that it fails by conventional standards, but that it fails in such monumental ways that it becomes enjoyable because of the failings themselves. Think of movies such as The Room and Samurai Cop and you’ll get what I mean. For this reason, it only seems fair to compare The Blessed Ones to such movies to determine its quality.
The movie opens with a montage of home-footage looking clips that is actually quite effective. The grainy style masks the low production value that the rest of the film so unashamedly flaunts, and as intros go, it’s not half bad. We see a little girl whose face is obscured by a blank, white effect, giving us the impression that what we are about to see is a paranormal horror movie. However, this illusion is quickly shattered once the film gets underway.
After the montage, we see our protagonist Spencer (Andy Yates) being taken into custody, where he is questioned about a cult that he left before the other members committed suicide so that their spirits could live eternally free of their bodies. Yes, really. Why they decide to arrest him I have no idea. The film isn’t really clear on that point. In fact, it’s not clear about much.
Most of the film pans out in near enough the following way: 1. The police ask Spencer about something and Spencer explains that something in full detail, 2. We see a flashback that plays out exactly what Spencer said, practically word for word, 3. One in every three scenes will include another flashback inside the first flashback, which will come out of nowhere and completely throw the audience off. Step one is quite clearly unnecessary. However, as far as bad filmmaking goes, it’s one of the highlights. There must be forty minutes worth of sequences that follow this exact structure (I don’t know if it really is forty minutes, but it certainly felt like it) and the constant repetition of telling before showing is a real barrel of laughs, even if it absolutely wasn’t supposed to be.
The acting, as you might expect, is dreadful throughout. On the bright side, it is often so bad that it earns The Blessed Ones some extra bad-movie points. Though it never quite sinks to the level of screaming, “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa,” or “I cannot believe you committed suicide, Jim,” (see The Room and Fateful Findings if those phrases mean nothing to you. You won’t regret it, I swear) there are some particularly tasty over-acting chops scattered throughout the film.
I think it’s about time we harked back to the girl with no face that I mentioned the start of the review. I wonder what she has to do with this movie? Drum roll please… Nothing! That’s right, great chunks of the opening montage have nothing to do with the movie whatsoever. You might be tempted into thinking that they’re just mood-pieces, placed early on to set the atmosphere of the film to come, but you’d be wrong. The movie isn’t a paranormal horror at all; it’s a vaguely supernatural chase thriller. I guess it borders on being a horror on occasion, but only a body horror.
Consistency, or lack thereof, is not only a problem for the film’s story and tone, but also for its directorial style. After a good twenty minutes of standard film action, the film switches to become a documentary for the soul purpose of poorly introducing a new character. Once his introduction is complete, the documentary style is forgotten, as is the character, near enough. There are even times when previously established visual styles, such as having a blackened wall behind Spencer during his interrogation, are forgotten about for as little as a shot. I’d like to say that these instances of forgetting to fill in the surroundings in post-production were intentional, but I doubt it. It’s much more likely that they were simply products of lazy editing.
All in all, The Blessed Ones is a pretty good bad movie, though not an excellent one. The story is virtually incomprehensible, the acting is laughably bad, and although it eventually becomes irksome, the constant repetition of describing scenes before showing them provides the film with its most hysterical moments. You won’t be able to quote this film for years to come, but you will be able to kill ninety cringe-inducing minutes at your next bad movie night.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★/ Movie: ★ ★ ★
James Turner is a writer and musician based in Sheffield. You can follow him on Twitter @JTAuthor
