2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus

You'd think a movie about a totalitarian government repressing religion would feature references to reviled places like China, Soviet Russia or the DDR. You'd be wrong. Instead, the protagonists are "oppressed" by the most benign, milquetoast, unthreatening government I've ever seen in media or real life. English is the world language, most likely because this movie was made for American Christians and learning a "scary" language like Russian or Chinese would be too much work. Christianity is apparently illegal, yet information is freely available on Wikipedia. All the Christians in this movie live their life in the open, in relative wealth, peace and comfort, and never even bother to hide their face, turn off phones and other possible tracking devices or use any kind of secrecy and/or common sense.

Being a Christian (no word about other religions, but I digress) is apparently classified as high treason and punishable by death, but there's no censorship, no visible repression, no dedicated teams to seek out and neutralize this so-called threat. The worst thing the protagonist' sister mentions about the new world order is that she now feels mildly uncomfortable seeing the police. If that's genuinely the worst thing the directors can come up with, while a fear of police brutality is a daily reality for millions of real-life Germans, their countrymen, then they must be the most sheltered, privileged people on this planet.

But that's the point: this movie is persecution porn by people who never had to face a smidge of actual persecution in their life. The directors have no experience organizing, or resisting police repression, or dealing with a spying and sabotaging government. It's a bunch of rich Christian influencers role-playing being oppressed, and failing spectacularly. That, aside from the bad acting, lacklustre worldbuilding, horrible pacing, etc, is what makes this movie a pain to watch.

To be used as an example of how not to make a movie!

What could be said about this production. Well, everything is bad about it.. the plot is cheesy, the script it cringe, acting is absolutely bewildering and the list goes on.

But i will say this one thing about it. In as many horrible movies that i have watched over the years (for science you see), this one is the only one to actually show you the production set/camera/support vehicles as they film the scenes. They could not even managed to pick their angles/b roll that hides that.

Anyway, aspiring film makers, watch this and do everything opposite and you will have success.

Wow, this is a hot mess! Entertaining only for how horrible it is.

The setup is your typical paranoid Christian persecution fantasy: Covid has been used as excuse to institute world government with "communism everywhere" and to outlaw Christianity - you know, all of Dr. Fauci's recommendations.

It takes place just four years in the future, but somehow everyone has forgotten "the way things used to be" until the protagonist explains it. No details of the New World Order are ever given, and everything takes place on a very small scale. Really, it just seems like one overzealous local police chief.

The "heroes" are a group of people who have decided to spread the word of Christianity again. They start with the bold act of spray painting fishes on things, once on piles of leaves. Eventually, they are aided by a woman who works in the police department, who is "what you would call a hacker" and she helps them identify "secret Christians" and invite them to rallies.

The story takes place in Germany, and most of the actors are German, reading horrible dialog in English with very strong accents. Some of the actors are American, reading horrible dialog in English with American accents. In one scene, two women start in English, and then inexplicably switch to German with subtitles, presumably because one of them didn't speak English well enough to get through it.

It's not clear how much of the dialog is written and how much is improvised, and the only director's note seems to be, "Speak more slowly and stretch it out. We've got to pad 90 minutes!".

The sets and props would embarrass the most humble community theater. The police station appears to be a middle school auditorium, with some furniture in the corner. The main characters all live together in an an apartment, which for some reason has black plastic draped on the wall, a tiny Christmas tree, and a random string of twinkle bulbs. Late in the movie, someone apparently donated a fog machine, so they fill the police station with fog, just because they can.

The movie remains weirdly agnostic about the virus, masks, social distancing, etc. Is it a hoax or is it real? I would assume the people making it are anti-mask, but the good guys always wear masks outdoors and socially distance, even when holding their super secret illegal meetings. On the other hand, they never wear masks indoors, when they're huddled together around the little Christmas tree. The bad guys randomly wear masks or don't, presumably based on the individual choices of the actors.

This really doesn't even rise to the "so bad it's good" level, mostly because it's just not that interesting and all the actors are so low energy. Without the goofy exploding birds of Birdemic or ... everything about Tommy Wiseau, it just sort of falls flat.

So only watch it if you're truly committed to seeing every bad movie.

"It's 2025. The world as we have known in 2020 does not exist anymore. The virus has changed the world. Communism is all over the place. A global state developed. Meetings are illegal, traveling is illegal, and Christianity is illegal." I HAD NO IDEA I WAS ABOUT TO PUT ON A CHRISTIAN DYSTOPIAN MOVIE.

Oh boy, the minute that last line dropped I knew I had hit the jackpot. For those who follow my reviews I've been watching a lot of really bad Christian media lately, but this is pure happy circumstance.

I'm sick right now, so while I'm bedridden I'm taking the opportunity to search for brainless, hopelessly stupid movies that won't challenge me in any meaningful way, and what could be more promising than a movie with a title like 2025: The World Enslaved by a virus?

This movie opens with a hilariously incompetently edited and shot car chase sequence that leads into a monologue during an interrogation sequence meant as a stand-in for the late movie inspirational "look what they've taken from us" speech, something that occurs within the first five minutes. I mean seriously, have you people never heard of an obscure little concept known as buildup? Speeches like this with the swelling stringed instruments to underpin what you're supposed to be feeling are only effective when we've actually witnessed two acts worth of the main characters struggling, first. But what really gets me about this speech is how it simultaneously tries to double as the opening expository "here's what the world looked like before and what happened to change things" moment, in which the main character explains these things to a middle aged agent of the state who is very obviously older than he is. Like, what? This movie takes place in 2025, and it came out in 2021. It has only been four years. You really need to explain to this dude twice your age what the world was like less than five years ago?

Sadly though, the rest of this movie doesn't live up to the promise given by that banger of an opening. It's quite surprising how much of this movie is bogged down with inconsequential filler. There's an entire 97 second sequence dedicated to one of the characters somberly preparing their breakfast cereal, an event that is painstakingly documented as she slowly, sadly gets the cereal out, weakly pours it in the bowl, gets the milk out, and sadly pours it in the bowl on top of her cereal, then picks up her spoon, and slowly and sadly stirs it around a few times, and then she sadly takes her first few bites while reading a note that's just barely illegible to the viewer due to how it's positioned on the screen, but it lingers on this shot for so long I couldn't help but get the sense I was supposed to be reading it along with her.

I mean seriously, as incompetently written and framed as Donald James Parker's entire filmography is, at the very least the man is efficient with his screen time. His movies don't contain a single wasted moment. For all of their inconsequential non plot related diatribes laden throughout, every single scene is packed to the brim with him communicating something to the viewer, whether it be his politics, what he thinks of himself, how he views women and racial/sexual minorities and Jews and Muslims, his general theology, and whatever else he happened to have thoughts on in any random minute he spend writing. Not a single moment passed in which I didn't feel like I was learning something about how Donald James Parker thinks.

But after 90 minutes of this, what do I now know about how the creators see the world? Mask mandates are literally the Holocaust? This majority Christian planet is hostile to Christians? Communism is bad? After that opening ten minutes I found myself expecting something meatier and more revealing about the creators than that. But instead all I got is how these creators have a massive throbbing boner for American imperialism in an unbelievable mid movie speech:

"Remember, we used to fight for other countries. We've freed countries from dictators, gave the power back to the people. We organized food and medication. Why did we do that? Because the dignity of man is holy.... They may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom." Now this mid-movie speech about 40 minutes in is just astonishing. This is honestly how these people view American imperialism. Also, there's a hysterical, sick irony in how people with an apparent admiration for the idea of organizing free food and medication for impoverished Latin American people in the form of foreign aid would think communism is evil. Lol what do you people think communism is? And oh dear lord how dare your invoke the most famous moment from Braveheart for this thuddingly brain dead speech. Honestly this speech alone would have made the entire movie worth it had I not had to sort through so much fat to get to it.

Like seriously, with as much contempt as I found myself developing for Donald James Parker personally throughout his sordid filmography, little did I know he'd end up becoming the gold standard for incompetent fundagelical-with-an-insufferable-persecution-complex media production.

This movie answers the question: what if a bunch of nobodies and incredibly giant babies got together and made a movie which comically tries to convince us that Christians are persecuted?