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Though released by the Christians
up at Cloud Ten in Canada, this film can easily pass as something of
interest to the secular world.
An actor or actress can receive no
greater compliment than when a viewer forgets he or she is watching a
performance and comes to truly hate a character on the screen. It happened
with me with Old Man Potter in It’s
A Wonderful Life, Mr. Blond in Reservoir Dogs and Tom Chaney in
True Grit. It happened this go of things too, with Prucha as Miss Pat.
Miss Pat remains the typical church busybody on the surface. If you
are a nonchristian who stopped going to church over some issue or another,
like me, you would recognize the personality type right away. Somehow she
figures she should be the pastor of the church and run the show behind the scenes, because she is a rich
contributor to the cause and a supposed bible-banger. Yet Miss Pat goes
beyond even that.
Miss Pat conveniently forgets some of the Ten Commandments she
ought to be observing, especially the one about killing people. Sometimes
sending her son to do her dirty work and sometimes taking matters into her
own hands, this mother/son tag team pile up a
scorecard of bodies behind the scenes, making them look like
accidental deaths. When the son kills the current pastor who has dared to
go against his mother’s wishes by smothering him with a plastic bag over
the head and covers it up with a gas explosion to erase his crime in the
first ten minutes of the movie, you know you aren’t in for the normal Christian
film experience. In fact, minus a ton of sappy bullshit, I
see the secular crowd liking this movie and many of the born-againers
somehow offended by it.
When the new pastor and his wife show up to replace the one Miss
Pat & company have demolished, things take a turn for the worse. Miss
Pat’s psychotic compulsions become known, one by one, where even this
well-intending pastor starts to have his patience tried. He later comes to
suspect Miss Pat may not be the routine church lady every church has
and hates to own up to, but something even more deadly.
Finally, Miss Pat turns into a blithering idiot out to do God’s
will. This will of course means to kill the sinners.
While the deadly duo pile up a few more bodies, the pastor and his
wife get away. The mother and son both die. If there is any justice in the
world, you won’t be seeing them up in heaven either!
When Miss Pat bites the dust, some of the churchgoers incredibly
cheered at early church screenings of this film.
A bit surprising there.
But then, maybe not!
A recommended movie if for no other reason than to see Miss Pat.
She is a greater religious fanatic/villain than Margaret White in Carrie,
Bishop Lee in September Dawn, or The Strangler in Don’t
Answer The Phone.
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