Faith-based-film fever is sweeping some very specific parts of the nation. Recent years have seen a noticeable spike in films espousing old-school Christian dogma, and the public response has been undeniable. First, zombie-deity Christian horror film God’s Not Dead returned a $62 million box-office gross on a $2 million budget. (That was a joke; there are no zombies in God’s Not Dead, but a woman does develop cancerous tumors as a direct-ish consequence of writing anti-Duck Dynasty blog posts.)
Two things here:
- This sounds apocalyptic to me. Is this the end of the world? Christians are notoriously bad filmmakers and they’ve been churning out a whole log of bad films lately.
- I had no idea that a woman was punished by God for writing anti-Duck Dynasty material in God’s Not Dead. That’s horrendous. I’ve written plenty of against Duck Dynasty and I’m a Christian. This represents everything that is wrong with Christian Filmmaking. I have to say that, as a Christian, and as a lover of good story, I think the “Christian” genre of films needs to go away. We don’t need good Christian films and Christian stories, we need just good films and good stories.
Company head Rick Jackson has moved to form Christian Family Entertainment, a production house with the stated agenda of financing and producing two religious films per year in perpetuity, until that final day where the rapture magicks all the good Canadian-born Jews to Heaven…
I think I’m going to throw up.