Sunday School Musical

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.

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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 Asylum have definitely done much worse than Sunday School Musical, that's saying little though because Sunday School Musical didn't work for this viewer. There are some redeeming value, Chris Chatman was likable as Zachary and had a great voice, the ending song was at least catchy and the best lyrics in the movie were in this song and the dance in the boy's bathroom is the most creative Sunday School Musical gets. The photography and camera work are pretty awful to say the least(like bad horror movie standard), to the extent you question whether there was a photographer at all. And it disallowed me to remotely enjoy the rest of the production values, which weren't that special actually to begin with. The songs are unmemorable with generic melodies and tired lyric writing, and the mostly tuneless singing and choreography that shows next to no passion don't help. The writing has cheesiness all over it, the spirituality and faith angles were good ideas but explored with the utmost banality. That the story is predictable is somewhat predictable, that it has no energy, real fun or passion isn't. The characters infuriate in how they behave and how they act towards one another, shallow is the best way to describe them, while apart from Chatman the acting is very poor, Candice Lakota has a decent voice but is a vapid actress. Overall, not terrible but at best lacklustre. 3/10 Bethany Cox

Faith Films, the company that put this out, is known for two things. The first is making crappy faith based movies. The second is they're owned by The Asylum. You know The Asylum. They're that company that makes crappy rip-off movies. While occasionally they come out with some "so bad they're good" movies like "Sharknado", most of the time they just make crap. The difference is Faith Films has never made a good movie.

Basically this is like High School Musical but with worse songs, worse acting and the most obvious AVR ever. I'm not kidding. Every single scene is crammed with terrible AVR. Maybe they couldn't afford a boom mike of something but it's not just that. The sound mixing is terrible. You don't even get any kind of background noise. If the characters aren't talking, then there's no sound.

Basic story is a student by the name of Zach is part of the choir that are going on to some big contest to win $10K. But he gets transferred to another school, joins their choir and has them join the contest as well. Shenanigans ensue as his old choir mates see this as a betrayal and Zach feels torn between his old friends and new friends.

Honestly there's no reason to see this. I'm not a fan of any of the High School Musical movies but I'd gladly watch one of those instead of this. At least the acting, singing and dancing is better in those.

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.

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.