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Ibanezz
Reviews
The Judas Project (1990)
Truly one of the greatest comedies ever!
I saw this originally when it was released to theaters here in 1994 (why does IMDb say 1990?). A friend who worked at a local theater told us about this "really controversial" movie about Christ. Being a movie geek I was surprised that I hadn't heard of it, but figured that it was a small indie movie that didn't get much publicity. Since the theater allowed her to bring herself and three others to a flick for free, she and I grabbed our significant others and checked it out.
This movie was one of the greatest movie experiences of my life.
Seriously.
Sunday night, opening weekend. There are 6 people in the theater, including us. We missed the first minute or two and had to play catch up to figure out the premise. Lucky for us the second scene set up the rest of the movie perfectly.
If you have the movie you must watch this scene. If you don't have it, run to the DVD bargain bin of your local Wal-Mart and dive in. I'll wait.
Okay, the scene shows "Jesse" and "Jude" talking in a small restaurant. The camera is only showing one of them at a time, sitting at opposite ends of a table. They're discussing the miracle that happened the night before. After a couple of these one-shots, the camera shows the entire table, and there's this large bearded lumberjack looking guy sitting between them. There was no set up that there was anybody other than Jesse and Jude there. I remember saying out loud something like, "where the hell did THAT guy come from?" and the rest of the movie became a MST3K experience. There was so many bad decisions in this movie, from casting to acting to writing to music and so on that I find it hard to believe that anyone could take this movie seriously. I understand the whole "good intentions" thing, but there has to be some semblance of talent to pull it off, especially a story which people know so intimately.
After the movie ended the four of us (there was only one guy left other than us) stood around in the parking lot for two hours, smoked a lot of cigarettes and kicked around our own version of the movie. Today I got the idea of how I could possibly come up with that version of the movie, which is why I'm visiting this site.
I must admit, when I watched this movie on DVD a year or so ago, it didn't seem as bad as it did originally. The director/writer/music guy was sincere as to how he wanted to see this movie done, but he just didn't have the ability to pull it off.
The best way to watch this is the way my friends and I originally saw it: totally obnoxious. Have a few drinks, get loose and throw it in.
I only rated it a 9 out of 10 because my toe got stepped on really hard that night and it hurt. Otherwise it would rate a 10.
Spoiler Warning! Jesse gets crucified.
Betcha didn't see that one coming.