The Garden

Beside good photography, the only other good thing about this movie was the skillful performance by veteran Lance Henriksen, (as old man Ben). Unfortunately, painfully, the other main characters seemed to have absolutely no sense of timing. This I attribute to directing/editing deficiencies. So many of the scenes are drawn out like taffy. Even parallel scenes belabor alternating imagery, least the audience miss the meaning of the juxtaposition I guess? Once the story got going I was optimistic that a provocative pay off was in store. Alas, it ended the way so many movies do, offering nothing more than borrowed meaning, delivering no message or perspective of their own.

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.

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.

A Blockbuster rental, I chose it mainly because of the seasoned character actors in it.

It was basically as I expected and the actors definitely made the movie better than the ancient story line would allow.

A 'very special' boy named Sam (Adam Taylor Gordon) is struggling with his parents divorce due to his father's alcoholism and other issues not apparent. This pushes Sam to self mutilate, but it seemed that there was more to Sam's self mutilation than just the divorce.

Sam's father David (Brian Wimmer) takes Sam traveling during his summer with the boy and they have a car accident caused by Sam's hallucinations, seemingly brought about by the will of Ben (Lance Henrikson) close to Ben's remote country home. Ben nurses them both back to health, but David is taken in by Ben's logical approach to life's problems and agrees to stay with Ben as a handy man until they can afford to leave. Sam and Ben never hit it off as Sam detects something odd in Ben's outlook on life and the continued hallucinations make life with Ben uncomfortable.

As the weak father turns to self indulgence with the urging of Ben, Sam gains strength from the other key mother figures to forgive and protect his father from whatever Ben has planned for them.

The plot is very simple. The struggle of good and evil people constantly battle within themselves and how blind faith can simplify life's decisions when people are guided through life's choices by logical (but evil) arguments they are ill equipped to refute.

If you don't have a very good background in Christianity/Judaism you will not understand the high degree of symbolism, and the movie will seem very heavily edited. I can see it being a cultural classic for the evangelical crowd.