Emanon

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.

Absolutely the worst movie I have ever seen. I rented it for my family because the guy at the video store recommended it. He said it was such a good film. I don't know what he was thinking. Normally, when a movie is bad, we turn it off, but this one we watched just so we could tell everyone how bad it was. I recommend that you waste your time to watch it.

If the rest of the movie industry would take their lead from this one, the entertainment world would be safer for us all. Although the movie could have been made a little better if top name actors and off camera contributors were used; the story line was magnificent and clean for a change. An overall good family movie that might provoke interesting questions from younger members of the family.

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.

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.