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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Eerie deja vu, November 22, 2005
This review is from: Ticket to Heaven (DVD)
In the late 70's I got caught up in the Moonie cult for a time in Northern California. This is a very accurate portrayal of the moonies of that time and place, right down to the rickety converted chicken coop they had their talks in, the cult member who follows you everwhere, the "choo choo yay pow" cheer. (Yes they really did use that!) The enforced conformity, The famous dodge ball game with chanting. Deadly accurate. Though the material is dated, and the ranch in the countryside where The moonies brought recruits is long since shut down, it's still a great film to watch...and to show your kids if you want to help them learn to avoid being sucked into cults of many kinds.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great film, deserves to be better known...., April 17, 2006
This review is from: Ticket to Heaven (DVD)
This film is very difficult to find on VHS and/or DVD. I saw it in a DVD store for 10 bucks a few years ago, so I picked it up. The film is a terrifying, intense, very realistic one, depicting with great accuracy the truth about cults. Nick Manusco gives an excellent performance as David, the young man who gets caught up in the cult. He has just broken up with his girlfriend, and decides to visit a friend of his in southern California. David doesn't know that his friend is in a cult. They program David through various methods, including lack of sleep, moving around and around without reason, lack of protein in the food they eat, isolation, and fellow cult members following him around at all times. Saul Rubinek plays his friend who finds out where he is, and helps get him out with a deprogrammer. The film isn't perfect. There are noticable continuity flubs, awkward edits, misplaced comic relief (even though the sign "it's always amateur night" in the comedy club is hilarious), but these are minor compared with the intensity and accuracy of the film. This film was made in Canada (when Canadian film production was at a nadir), and it's a lot more realistic than a Hollywood film would be about the same subject. There are excellent performances all around (check out a very young Kim Catrall as Debbie, a cult member who is scary in her loyalty to "Father"). Hopefully, somebody will reissue this film....
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A gutsy expose on how religious cults work, December 4, 2005
This review is from: Ticket to Heaven (DVD)
You have to hand it to the Canadians for having the guts to make such a true-to-life movie about cults: how they recruit, how they brainwash, how they make money. A little more contrast between the blind euphoria of the lower-tier cultists and the opulent, materialistic ways of the upper echelon would have been nice. And the movie was obviously made on a shoestring budget, which no doubt is hard to accept for someone raised on Hollywood production values. But Hollywood would NEVER make a film like this -- not with all the cultists running around in Tinsel Town! They'd boycott the production. Solid performances are turned in by Nick Mancuso as the "lost soul," Saul Rubinek as the friend who won't give up on him, Kim Cattrall as a bundle-of-energy cultist (actually one of the scariest characters in the film), and R. H. Thomson as the deprogrammer. If you can get past the made-for-TV-movie feel, this film is an excellent way to teach your kids about how cults operate and what they're really all about: money. --MellowMonk.com
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