Le Jardin des ténèbres

You don't have to have big budget production and CGI FX coiling out the rear to make a great movie, and movies like this proves it so.

The movie is basically about a problem young boy named Sam as in Samuel as in 'Judgement of God', turning his vices then into virtues within himself.

It has to do with the imperfections of his father and the trials that he has to overcome within himself once he's found a cause (the love for his father)to come out majestically to defeat the devil's plan to reverse the apocalypse.

Lawrence Hendrickson (who's a great actor) plays an excellent devil. He's odd, but old, he's calm but cunning but for the most part, subtle in his plans and not fire blazing like Al Pacino's portrayal (btw, The Devils' Advocate was an excellent film in its own rite).

The movie is very symbolic in a lot of ways, bloody at times, and a lot of one eyed, lip sewn shut specters, flaming swords, and horses.

The movie do kind of get's annoying with the ghosts whispering his name but plays out in the end for me. All in all, the plot isn't very complex but original and played out well.

I suggest you go to your local crap-buster's and rent a copy and judge for yourself.

Justed watched it very confusing but has great ending.A bad script but great acting from Lance.He made it watchable.You actually feel bad for his version of Satan because he acts so well.Sean Young is great as well.Kinda slow till the last half hour or so but not bad.Adam Taylor Gordon is brilliant he be awesome as he grows up.Some good scares but needed to explain more of what Lance's role was trying to do.Great biography on Lance +interview with him.Maybe with sequel the could expand what he was really trying to do.Bit of trivia did you know Lance was in the Omen 2.Good for rental if nothing else available or just like Lance.Also I can't really see this being a movie for christians it's too gory + to conveluded,and talks about reversing the apocalypse I don't really think it talks about that in the bible.Nice imagery of the four horsemen thats it.Sorry but as so called Christian theme it really misses the mark.For a good scary Christian movie rent The Vistation.That's a good scary movie for Christians or any one else.

When I sat down to watch the 2006 supernatural thriller "The Garden" here in 2022, it was without ever having heard about the movie. I stumbled upon the movie by random luck and saw that Lance Henriksen was on the cover. So of course I opted to sit down and watch what writer Samuel Vartek and director Don Michael Paul had to offer here.

The storyline, as written by Samuel Vartek, was fair enough. I mean, the story was well-enough paced, but the script did suffer from being somewhat generic and overly predictable. And sadly so, then there wasn't any surprises or any major ups and down throughout the course of the 92 minutes that the movie ran for. Don't get me wrong here, because "The Garden" is not a bad movie, it was just not an outstanding movie.

The acting performances in the movie were good, and I liked that they had cast Lance Henriksen for that particular role, especially since he was rather nicely cast for that role and pulled it off quite entertaining. I wasn't particularly familiar with the cast ensemble here, aside from Lance Henriksen, and I do believe that I might have seen Claudia Christian in a movie or two somewhere.

Visually then "The Garden" was okay. This wasn't a movie that was working heavy on the special effects, and the ones that were in the movie played out well enough.

There is a really good atmosphere in the movie, and that definitely helps to drive the movie forward.

My rating of "The Garden" lands on a five out of ten stars.

I totally agree with you about the production values. Some scenes were breathtaking, and the camera shots were very well done. Very interesting, visually. Nothing cheap or slipshod in the cinematography, that's for sure.

The movie needed a better story, or a more clear story, or maybe some exposition scenes (the four horsemen, for example) should have been earlier in the movie.

When you spend the first two-thirds of the movie wondering what's going on, it's easy to lose interest before you get it figured out.

10 stars for the directing, editing, cinematography; 5 for the plot. It's worth a rental.

I saw this movie at the BIFFF (Brussels international festival of fantasy film) and found it struggling with it's plot material.

A young boy suffers from nightmarish visions and as a result has a tendency to put his body full of razor cuts. The boy resides with his father who is recovering from alcoholism and fails to be of support for his troubled son.

When father and son end up having a car accident caused by a vision the boy has, they get rescued by an elder man named Ben (Lance Henriksen).

Ben has a spooky air around him; vanishing and appearing at random pace throughout his ranch, always the sharp answer or life lesson on his tongue.

Ben has a weird agenda as he manipulates the father into alcoholism again and the boy into experiencing weird visions.

The movie tries so hard to build up the Christian undertone (think tree of life, adam & eve, apocalypse themes) but fails at each occasion.

The visions of the boy are the only up tempo sequences as the rest of the movie focuses on Lance Henriksen talking in Chinese fortune cookie lingo.

A shame, because the production values are there, the star (Henriksen) is wasted with this kind of script and the editing tries to contrast every moment of suspense with random actions (like heating up a stove, cleaning a fish, ...) This is B-movie material, a rental for the Henriksen fans, others should wisely avoid.