Wildfire: The Arabian Heart

Okay, YES the acting is horrible, for a movie, in fact, this is definitely the worst acting I've seen in a movie. But the acting isn't horrible all around. I felt like I was watching a bootlegged recording of a stage presentation. I got the feeling that this would have made a really good play and the actors were probably all stage actors or drama students. There's a difference, stage actors tend to over act in order to add a little flair to the stage, movies don't need that extra umph because they have production budgets that fill in the holes.

However, since the budget on this movie was so low, it's understandable why it turned out this way. I wouldn't say it's a horrible movie, the story line is decent if you can get past the acting, just don't be prepared to expect too much.

Overall the story is good, and the plot is believable, but other than that it seems to have been produced by amateurs. Writing was horrible at best.

Acting is well, obviously pushed. Who played Lindsay's brother. Really? That's the best they could have done? And her mother? I am guessing she has zero acting history. Chemistry was not there.

But with a low budget you rarely get quality talent. In some of the scenes I don't think they even used a sound engineer. The echo and background noises are right there.

I wanted to write a better review, but just couldn't lie.

From the beginning, it looked like a home-made! Nothing against home-made or low budget films, they can be good -- but this one surely isn't! How it got a rating of 8+ I don't understand, I guess the 10 votes came from relatives & friends of these amateur actors. It just went from bad to worse, bad acting, very bad sound and editing, awful directing etc. etc. -- it is simply impossible to do the subject justice. Most of the time it sounds like the actors are reading their scripts off, the sound fades and some actors' voice come across muffled (maybe their mikes didn't work? Or they were too far away from the recording mike.) Scene changes are arbitrary, sometime a bunch of new characters appear on screen without being introduced in any way, then later they may just walk off to the side, leaving the set. Well, enough said...

The perfect inaugural movie for "Bad Movie Night". I gathered my film-making friends, opened the bar, and we enjoyed a fantastic evening mocking this terrible cinematic creation.

For a movie this bad, it's hard to know where to start. Plot holes large enough to drive a grip truck through, a lack of any recognizable acting ability, the substandard script, the redundant (borderline obnoxious) soundtrack, the under-mixed audio, the typo-ridden credits... the list is long. Truly awful. And there were no bonus features on the DVD - I was at least hoping for a director's commentary to laugh at, as well!

As one of my friends said: "I laughed, I cried, I want my money back." And it was a free screening.

Rented this through Blockbuster vending machine for my grand kids. It didn't take 15-minutes before they were griping about how stupid it was (and they weren't even ten-years old). To say this production was poorly made would be to give it a compliment which it doesn't deserve. Bad writing and editing, dialog that could only be surpassed by reading the phone book from cover to cover aloud and more wooden performances than a Pinocchio family reunion are just the tip of how awful this film was. Five years since viewing it, it proves that some things unlike cheese and wine don't improve with age. "Wildfire" can safely be added to this list. This dud puts family-values films in a very bad light. I give a "1" only because "1/2" isn't and option.

P.S.

A great family values film? Bought worse for $5.00 at Walmart? Compared with what other titles? You'd really have to scrape the bottom of the bin to find anything more putrid. Granted it's not like the zombie- themed flicks that seem so prevalent these days. But come on, make more like this? Whatever family value lessons "Wildfire: The Arabian Heart" might have to share are buried by terrible acting, script writing that needs some intensive RIGHTING and technical problems that just shouldn't have happened in the hands of a skilled director, producer and editor. When kids below the age of ten will tell you within five-minutes--"This movie is boring", then you can say accurately never have so many dollars been wasted so badly so that so many viewers can eject this disc so quickly. Revised my rating from one star to none.