Sunday School Musical

The Asylum is a company known for making shoddy knockoff products or rather mockbusters. I'm not quite sure what the difference between those two things is. This is an obvious ripoff of "High School Musical" which a lot of people hated to begin with. HSM at least has the distinction of being the first in the series and having (somewhat of) a budget. You could easily see the budget was so low they couldn't even have extras in most scenes. HSM was way better with that! This was a bad religious movie before most bad religious movies like "Left Behind", "God's Not Dead" and "Saving Christmas".

I guess bad religious movies have always been around. I'm actually glad this wasn't a mockbuster of something supernatural or else we'd see horrible special effects. This movie is extremely boring with bad acting. There's one scene where the kid just gets mad on a rooftop with leads to no dancing or anything. Why is the main character so mad about moving when he can easily travel back to his old place all the time? Watch "Bridge To Terabithia", once again, for a good religious movie. *1/2

My family has bought a lot of Christian DVD's recently. I, personally bought one which was a Filipino Christian movie. It was really worth the price so I decided to look for another. As I was browsing along the store, I saw this and it cost 250 Php. Thank God I only got 200 during the moment.

When I finally got home I looked at this page and found too many negative feedback about the film. Because of them, I decided to download an illegal copy first, not to watch it but just to preview it. I do not support piracy.

About the film, I had my left eyebrow raised the whole time. As I move the slider, there's always an awkward scene. The cinematography, the acting, the music, the projection, the choreography, the dialogue... It isn't cheesy...not even cool. It sucks, to be honest. As a fan of both modern and classic musicals, I can say so.

I think the director is good. So are the actors, the song writers, and everyone who made this film although it made me feel like I was watching a movie I made for a school project. They need more training and everything. They can be better. I believe this isn't their best yet.

I'm still looking forward to future projects of Faith Films even though this was a big disappointment... I'm just going to buy To Save A Life when it's out in my country rather than this.

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?

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.

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.