User Reviews

Don't get me wrong I completely understand that when Director Ernie Rettino set out to make a Christian children's television series and song albums he had the best of intentions at heart. However there is a fine line when it comes to children television between friendly characters and creepy guy in a suit talking to small children. Kids Praise 4 is not only extremely outdated (filmed in 1992) but you can clearly see the budget on the screen in every shot or the lack there of. Our main character Psalty the talking Psalm book, looks like a combination of Rob Ross and Ronald McDonald, wearing and anthropomorphic book suit that I assume was extremely uncomfortable for Rettino to wear. The child actors are worse than a 1980s Saturday morning toy commercial, and I feel like they should be running away from Psalty and telling an adult, rather than then joining in his antics.

The story begins when Psalty drives by in his song mobile, and he and the children go to the old church to praise Jesus. They then go to the old attic of the church (I'm not joking), and there they do various scenes of Biblical lessons and song numbers and it's here we see the child actors real "acting" talent. After a few songs we are introduced to Charity Church Mouse, imminently we see she's is female actor with very poor prosthetics to looks like a mouse, but it just comes off as creepy. She tells the kids her goal is to go to California to become a gospel singer, they sing a few more songs that are terribly dubbed (probably because the actors couldn't actually sing due to the prosthetics). After a few more songs we're introduced to the Church mouse choir, which I can only describe as first graders in low budget rat costumes they make Charity their leader which she then declines because of her hopes to still pursue a singing career. Using the Song Mobile she continues to write her own songs and is immediately "interrupted" by one of the choir mice. I know there was supposed to be a time lapse in these scenes but it's almost nonexistent. Next Charity is in a dream sequence with an even creepier anthropomorphic rat offering her dream singing contract and of course it ends up that the rat is a metaphor for greed as she is trapped in a cage at the end of the song. Charity wakes up and realizes she needs to spot perusing her own goals and serve God instead. She then accepts the Church Mouse Choir's invitation to become their leader and serve God the way she was always meant to do. Which confuses the morals because if she wanted to become a gospel singer in the first place wouldn't she be serving God anyways? Overall this movie was terrible the acting was pure cheese, the costumes are something out of a horror movie, the morals are confusing and I feel like the actors should have repressed memories of this whole ordeal. I know there were good intentions in making this film but it just crosses the line of innocent to creepy way to many times. Would I recommend this film? Hell NO!