Audience Member
Glad this went straight to dvd... ouch.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/15/23
Full Review
Audience Member
<i>Pray 2</i> is slightly better than the original <i>Pray</i>, in that it gets to the action fairly quickly and leaves the "teenagers hang out" part of the film as a mere subplot. A subplot which, I might add, is pretty much irrelevant to the rest of the film.
If you remember the prologue of the first film in the trilogy, there was a woman with a young daughter who was apparently kidnapped by The Shadow - she was never mentioned again in the first film. We open with this woman in a make-shift hut (the characters inexplicably refer to it as a <i>barn</i> throughout the film), her hands and feet duct taped together. Considering the repeated images of chains in the first movie, why isn't she tied up with chains? Her captor apparently has no plans for her, save for just keeping her locked up: no grisly murder or sexual molestation here, folks, keep on moving. The woman easily breaks free form her confines and the movie skips forward one full year: she is now a best-selling author, on a talk show to describe her ordeal (which the book is about). Considering that practically nothing happened during the entire ordeal, I wonder what exactly she wrote in the book.
Where in the original <i>Pray</i>, the most religious moment came when the protagonist asked Jesus to start her car, this time author Laurie Curtis (oh my god, I totally JUST got the joke) gets into a conversation with the talk show host about how God was obviously there helping her get out of the poorly constructed hut. When questioned why she attributes God's help during the escape, but doesn't blame God for letting her get captured in the first place, Laurie explains that it's because we have <i>free will</i>... except for the times when God intervenes in our lives, duh. Whatever, whatever.
Meanwhile, a group of church kids - including the girl from the first movie - go camping in the woods. Again, their story is pretty inessential to the movie. At one point, they have a conversation about the Darwin Awards, a joke awarded posthumously to people who died in spectacularly stupid ways, but because they're Christians and are therefore afraid to say the name Darwin, they refer to it as the "Worst Luck" awards. Why even mention it at all?
The guy who captured Laurie in the first movie is back after a year of hiding from police, and he is after her yet again! Or maybe he's in the woods, trying to scare these kids! The police are called in. The police chief dramatically tells his dispatcher: "...He's back." Eventually, the FBI joins the fray as well. Why is the FBI involved in a local kidnapping gone awry? "Apparently this guy's been doing some other things," the FBI agent on the scene explains. Oh, some other things! Why didn't you say so before? Welcome to the team! The local police and the FBI clash repeatedly, because the most that writer/director Dr. Matt Mitchell knows about how the police work is from television shows.
To give you an idea of how ridiculous this movie is, let me describe a scene to you. Laurie gets home and finds her dog looking sickly. She takes him to the vet at 10:00 at night, since they are still open. The scene of her filling out paperwork and explaining to the veterinarian's assistant what problems the dog has been having is unnecessarily long. When she returns home, the vet calls her in a panic. It turns out, he explains, that the dog was sick because he had something in his stomach: two human fingers. "Laurie, someone might be in your house!" the vet yells. "Look around, see if you can see any blood or a body!" That's when Laurie notices the bloody handle on the closet door, which was in plain sight the entire time. It's just absolutely incredible.
And then the ending, oh god, the ending. It's not as fantastic as the finale for the original <i>Pray</i> was, but it is still remarkable. Like some sort of horrible soap opera, the ending stretches the limits of your disbelief and only creates more questions. If the police knew who they were tracking, then why don't they know...?
But perhaps the most amazing thing is that just before the credits roll, Dr. Matt Mitchell thought that it was important that the screen say boldly: FILMED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Because, you know, fuck those other countries. Or something. And stay tuned through the credits for some hilarious bloopers. One of the bloopers shows the director blatantly ducking to get out of the way of the camera during a scene in the woods. Because Mitchell thinks so low of his audience (I don't blame him), the scene plays out a second time with a "just in case you missed it", and a giant arrow pointing out Mitchell ducking in the midground. It's just... just incredible.
Although not quite as inept as the first movie in the trilogy, <i>Pray 2</i> still manages to deliver a terrible story, a boring and pointless subplot, bad acting, stupid dialogue, and ignorant appeals to faith. Oh, and there's a scene when the kids are at camp where the boom mike is pretty clearly in the shot. But I wouldn't expect anything less from Cross Shadow Productions, and I can't wait for <i>Pray 3: End Game</i> to be released in Fall 2010.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
01/15/23
Full Review
Audience Member
A low budget Christian movie with poor acting but a good message.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/05/23
Full Review
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