The Vortex Voices

A film about a homophobic, anti-society, manson style hippie acid cult.

It has a lot of guitar playing, a bunch of singing, and a bit of, wholly uninteresting, murder...but not much else.

The whole thing is incredibly boring.

And that's about all that can be said about it.

It's one of those home-made independent films...where the writing, acting, and plot structure is completely amateurish.

At first I thought it was going to be a parody of cult films...but it actually takes itself seriously.

Which is the real crime here.

It's simple to see what they were going for...making the cult a hodge podge of manson's "the family" and jim jones' "jonestown".

But it just comes off as a complete failure.

If you accidentally find yourself crossing paths with this film, do yourself a favour and pass it by.

Because it's definitely not worth wasting an hour and a half of your life on.

I've made that sacrifice for you.

1 out of 10.

The acting in this film is atrocious. The writing is below pedestrian grade. And the directing - well, the directing is unbearable, because the photography is so incompetent that as the film proceeds, or rather fails to proceed, you're left wondering just how large a quantity of hallucinogenic drugs it took to induce a group of people to make this horrendously awful project. Were people really this ignorant back in the 1960s and 1970s era of hippie cults? That's the question this film should be posing, and it would be posing that question if it were even faintly competent. Instead, you come out of it with the question, were a group of people actually found who were ignorant enough to make this project? There is poor filmmaking, and then there is the failed attempt even to accomplish poor filmmaking, and this is the latter.

Take a nobody hillbilly director, a high-school camera, a fistful of Confederate dollars, and some zero-talent actresses, and you have this... thing. A cult of fools who make you laugh out loud if you haven't already shut the screen and turned it off. The amazingly terrible plot: a cult leader goes into the woods, selecting women on the basis of their willingness to prostitute themselves, be hoodwinked, and be too timid to point out his BO, and meanwhile, selecting men on the basis of their possession of cash or willingness to steal cash. It isn't a horror; it's a Q-side comedy. That's how awful it is.

It's humorous, in the way that horrible films are humorous. I almost compared this film to "The Amityville Horror" in that way, but "Amityville Horror" is at least a real film. This muddled mess is a collection of discontinuous half-stories and hippie songs, filled with acting that looks like it's too drunk, high, or both to be believable. Cults in the 1960s and 1970s were evil, quasi-religious organizations that fed on people's need for belonging to gratify the toxic egos of the leaders. But in this filmic instance of meta-cult, there's a cult on set of terrible "actors" and "actresses" needing to feel like they're part of something. People do technically have the right to be drunk, high, and to sing out of tune - just don't try to make a film out of any of that. It's insincere.

The entire tone of this movie is so flat, it was difficult to find engaging at all. The acting seemed stunted, none of the characters had real intensity or charisma, none inspired captivation, all things necessary in portraying a cult. The music seemed to try and substitute for storyline, and left me wanting to fast forward every time they started singing, which leaves little actual movie left.