Sunday School Musical

Before I set out to watch this movie, I checked out the reviews here and a few users believed this movie was worth every cent they forked out for it. I, on the other hand, after watching the movie, strongly believe otherwise. For most parts, the movie dabbled in some teen angst like moving away from your friends and participating in competitions and so on and so forth. And that was pretty much it. Not to mention the songs sounded particularly like a Boyz II Men karaoke compilation throughout. Their acting was nothing shy of mediocre and I was cringing for most times whenever they aren't breaking out into some dance or song. To be precise, their acting was very forced and amateur-ish. It wasn't very entertaining in other words and if you are already a HSM fan, please do not proceed to ruin your movie experience by watching this.

The Asylum have definitely done much worse than Sunday School Musical, that's saying little though because Sunday School Musical didn't work for this viewer. There are some redeeming value, Chris Chatman was likable as Zachary and had a great voice, the ending song was at least catchy and the best lyrics in the movie were in this song and the dance in the boy's bathroom is the most creative Sunday School Musical gets. The photography and camera work are pretty awful to say the least(like bad horror movie standard), to the extent you question whether there was a photographer at all. And it disallowed me to remotely enjoy the rest of the production values, which weren't that special actually to begin with. The songs are unmemorable with generic melodies and tired lyric writing, and the mostly tuneless singing and choreography that shows next to no passion don't help. The writing has cheesiness all over it, the spirituality and faith angles were good ideas but explored with the utmost banality. That the story is predictable is somewhat predictable, that it has no energy, real fun or passion isn't. The characters infuriate in how they behave and how they act towards one another, shallow is the best way to describe them, while apart from Chatman the acting is very poor, Candice Lakota has a decent voice but is a vapid actress. Overall, not terrible but at best lacklustre. 3/10 Bethany Cox

The DVD cover said High School Musical inspired, blatantly so. I accept that HSM can be inspiration, for me anyhow.

The price was relatively low. Play the DVD, I found there to be highs and lows. Low budget films can be okay, but one often has to be able to shrug off flaws in order to experience them as okay. So, most big budget stuff has flaws, too, and these also need to be within limits that the individual can tolerate.

This is a musical and the soundtrack construction is where I most notice signs of lack of expertise. When the songs come along the record volume often seems to have been turned up. With my volume control set at a bit lower volume than usual then I can tolerate things.

The next flaw is the credibility of the storyline, this is nowhere near the only story that has difficulties with that so one does gradually pick up expertise in being able to get by. One has a limited choice if one hopes for a credible plot? The nice aspect of that, for me, is that it helps HSM to feel more believable. They really do after watching this.

So, a low cost DVD inspired in part by HSM and with care I can tolerate the main flaws.

Except that this is a Sunday school story. The plot centres around church activities. As an émigré from the churches I find this to be the difficult part. The best songs are very churchy. These days, for me that does get in the way.

*

Move away from religion, I found it way too easy to need to consider standard stories as text for a secular religion. There were maybe even beliefs in the sixties that centred on that. Paradox. I found that got in the way, how I approached things, but it also seemed like an essential idea.

Around 2009, when two missionaries from Utah called at my house I mentioned that I no longer looked to religion, but that I did consider the Salt Lake City manufactured HSM to be Utah religious texts that I could accept. I got the impression that the missionaries considered me to be misunderstanding secular religion.

Sunday School Musical (2008) does help me with this. It is clearly religious stuff and considers what used to be understood as basic religious topics. These also relate to the day to day world.

Watch HSM soon after and I can now accept them just as rather neat stories. I do not need them to be anything but sugar. The sugar of the frocks, the sugar of the best of Sharpay, whatever. HSM is inspirational if one can accept them as sugar? I should have told the missionaries that Utah professionals have made some very respectable sugar?

Faith Films, the company that put this out, is known for two things. The first is making crappy faith based movies. The second is they're owned by The Asylum. You know The Asylum. They're that company that makes crappy rip-off movies. While occasionally they come out with some "so bad they're good" movies like "Sharknado", most of the time they just make crap. The difference is Faith Films has never made a good movie.

Basically this is like High School Musical but with worse songs, worse acting and the most obvious AVR ever. I'm not kidding. Every single scene is crammed with terrible AVR. Maybe they couldn't afford a boom mike of something but it's not just that. The sound mixing is terrible. You don't even get any kind of background noise. If the characters aren't talking, then there's no sound.

Basic story is a student by the name of Zach is part of the choir that are going on to some big contest to win $10K. But he gets transferred to another school, joins their choir and has them join the contest as well. Shenanigans ensue as his old choir mates see this as a betrayal and Zach feels torn between his old friends and new friends.

Honestly there's no reason to see this. I'm not a fan of any of the High School Musical movies but I'd gladly watch one of those instead of this. At least the acting, singing and dancing is better in those.

The entire movie is so good! From the terrible songs to the choppy editing, you won't be able to tear your eyes away from a single scene in this movie (in a car crash on the side of the road kinda way)! All of the choirs sound bad, even the lead one I'm supposed to think is good (NOTE FOR THE CHOREOGRAPHERS: I know they all probably came in not knowing how to dance, but did you even try to teach them? or did the director just give them half-thought mannerisms from behind the camera?). One thing that would've been nice is if the shots of the kids singing lined up with their mouths moving, or sounded like the same person singing throughout the movie. I'm sure they're children and thus not all professional singers, but they couldn't find at least one decent sounding person per character to at least do the dubs for their songs? This movie asks me to suspend my belief for too long- 1 hour, 33 minutes, 19 seconds too long. I can't say I was a devout Christian going into this movie, but I definitely am not now.