Emanon

My childhood memory puts this movie at a 10! I will admit I have not yet watched this movie as an adult/parent.

I did however watch this movie as a kid, and it affected my life. This was a great movie for a low budget film in the 80's.

As a kid I did not completely understand the plot other than a young disabled boy who befriends a man who everyone else hates.

It's basically a story about the harsh judgments mocking Jesus went through, retold in modern day times through the eyes of a young boy.

The simple act of watching this movie as a child made me hate the way people were treated and discriminated against simple because they were different. It also put into perspective the pain and persecution Jesus went through. It really did change the way I looked and the way I treated people different than me.

Now if your judging this movie by the time and money spent on special effects, A+ actors, popularity, and publicization than you probably wont like it. But the warm and sad feelings I felt watching this movie as a young boy stuck with me my whole life. And I can not speak for the rest of the movie watching world, but to me a good movie evokes feelings: tears, anger, fear and love. The more a movie leaves you thinking or feeling at the end or even the way it changes the way you look at life or things in general is a great movie. Bottom line as a young mature boy I LOVED THIS MOVIE. As an adult? Yet to be determined.

My review was written in December 1987 after watching the film on Charter Entertainment video cassette.

"Emanon" is a well-meaning but unsuccessful throwback to inspirational cinema, combining elements that would have fit in a Shirley Temple film in the 1930s with a plot line suited for a "Highway to Heaven" tv episode. Pic, a family effort by two generations of the Paul brood, was self-distributed briefly in 1986 ahead of current home video availability.

Writer-direct Stuart Paul also appears as Emanon (that's No Name spelled backwards), a young Bowery bum in New York, who performs very minor "miracles" such as delivering a baby and convincing a young model (r4eal-life sister Bonnie Paul) not to jump off a church roof in despair.

Emanon is befriended by rich, crippled kid Jason (Jeremy Miller) whose beautiful mom Molly (Cheryl M. Lynn) is struggling to run her late husband's fashion business. With Emanon's help, Molly "creates" a new line of peasant garb to save her nest egg, while Jason miraculously throws his crutches away at the climax. Absurd overstatement has Emanon literally crucified by an angry New York mob, mad that he is not the messiah they thought he was.

Picture is overly saccharine in driving home its message of faith, while the casting of the two leads, Paul himself and Lynn, leaves it sorely lacking in acting skills. Jeremy Miller as the cute kid handles the thesping quota while Patrick right, a familiar face from B pictures, provides comic relief as the kid's chauffeur.

I actually rented this movie years and years ago thinking it might be good. Wrong! The acting, direction, plot, story, dialog, cinematography, etc. etc. were horrible. From then on it went down. I'm trying to remember some of the plot so as to give a summary, but there's not much worth remembering. The "crippled" boy doesn't always remember which leg is crippled, and it's pretty evident that the actors don't remember the plot (if it really had one).

The only redeeming part of this movie is that it's so bad it's laughable, which is why I rated it a "2" instead of a "1." I'm surprised Mystery Science Theater didn't find it.

Only waste your money on it as a joke. I actually did hunt it down to buy as a joke for my husband. We tried to watch it again, but failed.

I have often thought of this movie over the years, it was truly a very good movie, and the nay sayers have zero heart. Around the same time as Emanon (backwards for NoName) came out, The Seventh Sign also came out, and there were tons of movies heralding the end of the world, with a savior to lead the way. This movie was no different. I thought of the movie tonight on a whim, and tried to see if it was on Prime Video or Netflix or Tubi, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Then, I tried looking in the DVD department, and what do you know?! I am buying it, along with a number of other great movies from the 80's, because that's when they KNEW how to make original movies, instead of just rehashing all the old ones time and again. Take the time, watch the movie, let your heart be moved like in Second Hand Lions and Letters to God...

All I will say is that this is one of the few movies ever made without sex or violence that has no redeeming social value. I am in the credits but I won't say what I did.