Johnny Frank Garrett's Last Word

This movie had it tough from the start. For those who have seen "Red White and Blue": well they had high expectations. Or different kind of expectations. This movie does not meet them. It is very weird and tough to describe. You have Sean Patrick Flannery in it and he's almost not recognizable through all the make-up he's wearing (face blown up sort of, as in prosthetic).

But he's not the main character in this strange mix of horror, drama and fantasy. There are some very well shot, but very unnerving scenes, that you'll either like for being different or hate for that exact fact. I don't recommend watching a trailer often, but in this case it does make sense to get a feeling and will help you either save time or watch something you otherwise would have missed

Johnny Frank Garret raped and killed a nun and is put to death for his heinous crime then returns to exact revenge upon those responsible and their families.

Hardly an original concept, in fact we've pretty much seen the same thing several times over and done considerably better.

So what makes this stand out? Decent performances but lesser known actors, and that deep south old time religion vibe which is scary in itself.

I couldn't decide if this film had anti or pro religious messages but regardless was certainly a prominent theme.

Johnny Frank Garrett looks a lot like Charles Manson. You know Charles Manson? That guy everyone refers to as one of the worlds most famous serial killers even though he didn't actually kill a single person. Seriously, look it up. We live in a glorious age where information is readily available at our fingertips yet people still think that Manson was a killer, that the earth is flat and that pineapple isn't allowed on pizza! The biggest flaw of JFGLW is that its all so confusing, as with many movies of this genre the "Being(s)" don't follow any natural rules so it all gets a bit weird as the creators as making stuff up as they go along. Like Doctor Who when he and he comrades were in space aboard a ship and there was a bad guy in with them so they shot the windscreen out and he got sucked out into deepspace. Did nobody writing that see a problem there? Unoriginal concept, sketchy creation, pretty poor but saved due to a decent cast.

I have sincerely no clue what other reviewers thought that was confusing about this movie. I just don't get it. To me Johnny Frank Garrett's Last Word was much better than what I expected from a movie with a title like that. Simon Rumley did a great job directing this interesting story, the cinematography was spot on, made it all look very professional for a low budget movie. The way it was shot is better than most of the movies in this genre, the sound effects fitted perfectly to create an evil ambiance. The horror parts were certainly good enough to keep any horror fan watching it till the end. The acting wasn't bad either so to me this movie deserves a much higher rating than it actually gets. A good surprise for me.

Being from the area where this murder and subsequent execution happened, I've always been pretty interested in the story. There is enough doubt in the outcome of the case to make a movie that would be really fascinating. This one isn't.

I get it, they attempted to make a horror movie. Instead, they made a confusing movie that wasn't all that scary. I think I would have been less irritated had they not tried to link it to an actual murder. What is actually scary about the Johnny Frank Garrett story is the possibility an innocent man was executed and that it could happen to anyone. There's a documentary out there by a local lawyer, though it's somewhat slanted, it is pretty informative.

There were a couple of good actors in this film and I think they did their best with the content provided. Sadly, there just wasn't much there to work with.

This is a campfire ghost story with delusions of being a film. Even the line of text we are given in the end has the feeling of "hanging from the door handle was a BLOODY HOOK!"

The choices in color saturation felt contrived. The filmmaker might as well have put captions in "this is a hallucination... this part is supposed to be scary." There were some odd, amateurish editing choices (such as phone calls where the view jumped back and forth between the main character and a side character, such as a secretary we will never see again, when a voice heard on the other end of the line would have been less distracting and just as useful). Most of the characters manage to be both overwrought and entirely two-dimensional. Many of them were just thrown in oddly for no apparent purpose other than to beef up the time.

Basically, as I said, it's a campfire tale. Someone tried to flesh it out enough to fill the time required for a movie, but most of it was not only unnecessary, it was distracting.

Ultimately, the question for this film isn't whether it was good or bad, but "why?"