Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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63 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's just... wow...., August 18, 2003
It's... wow. And then... wow. It's just... wow....I'm really not sure how to describe this movie. It was really funny. The basic premise is that in Ottawa, vampires are hunting lesbians for a nefarious scheme. The Church doesn't know what to do, so they go to Jesus, who has been living in seclusion, saving souls and baptizing people. With his trusty cohorts Mary Magnum and the retired Mexican Wrestling Federation champion El Santos, Jesus does battle with the forces of darkness. The movie is not meant to be taken too seriously. It attempts to be a camp classic, and I must admit, it succeeds beautifully. My friends and I kept laughing throughout the movie. It was so much more fun that any of us expected. The acting was campy, the "special effects" budget was a ... bottle of glitter, and the fight scenes were, well, really, really horrible. However, throughout all of this, the movie still remained very positive. The ending scene with the "Sermon on the Mount" ("Sermon from the Gazebo"?) had some very good points. The music was also pretty good. If your religious sensibilities are easily offended, you will probably not like this movie. If you have a sense of humor, you will. While the movie pushed some boundaries, I didn't see anything offensive about it.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Canuck film with gallows humour and buckets of sloppy gore, March 28, 2004
First, let's get one thing out of the way: This is not a b-movie, it's a z-grade movie. We're talking about a self-financed picture starring a bunch of students at Ottawa's Carleton University made on a reported budget of $100, 000. That said, viewers weaned on safe and sound Hollywood fare of the silver screen will want to stay far, far away. People as myself who love trash cinema however will likely get a kick out of this, although this film is by no means a masterpiece of bad cinema. A strange plague has overridden the city of Ottawa. Daylight-walking vampires have invaded the city, slaying many and causing a shortage of lesbians (don't ask...). Two priests then call to the chosen one, Jesus H himself, to restore order to the once peaceful Canadian capital. Jesus, using his magic powers of Kung-Fu, does the best he can but soon finds himself way outnumbered against the hordes of the undead. Down in the dumps, Jesus calls Mexican wrestler El Santos to the rescue. Together, Jesus Christ and El Santos form a Tag Team to rid the city of the undead. The first thing one notices right away is how much fun everyone seems to be having making this movie. The film is filled with awkward acting and dialogue but the exuberance and joy of the people involved more than make up for that. It really looks like a film made by a bunch of friends with too much time on their hands. Most of the actors in this are either punk rockers (the people on Jesus' side) or Goths (the vampires). One of the priests who calls for Jesus' help has a red-couloured Mohawk and a leather jacket filled with spikes just to give you an idea. This film is somewhat of a musical but not the whole way through; it switches styles every 20 minutes or so. As the actors in this film are all punks and Goths you can imagine just what kind of music plays during the musical parts, mostly hardcore old-school punk. The problem that I have with J.C. vampire hunter is its length. Although only 87 minutes long, it still seems to drag on forever. It is simply too cheaply produced and ridiculous to sustain interest for that amount of time. The first 20 minutes or so had me laughing uncontrollably but then things started to grow wearisome. Once El Santos appears toward the third tier of the movie things get interesting again but it seems a little too late at that point. Really, this film would have worked better as a 30-minute short if say, the first 15 minutes were combined with the final 15 and then I would have awarded this five stars. Still, if you love cheap B-Movies you owe it to yourself to watch this. Just to give you an idea how crazy this movie is imagine this scene: El Santos and Jesus enter a bar and order a couple of beers on tap. As the two of them soon realize the bar is overrun with Vamps, Jesus blesses his beer and proceeds to spit it in the ghouls' faces, who then burn to death. Yes folks, crazy stuff. Recommended as a party movie, for this is guaranteed to make everyone laugh out loud at least a dozen times throughout.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enter The Messiah?, December 20, 2005
JESUS CHRIST VAMPIRE HUNTER is one of the weidest movies ever made. It's the kind of movie that's so bad, it's good. It's too low-budget, low-brow, and low-profile to love, yet too light-hearted intentionallly hilarious, and unintenionally hilarious to hate. It's way too goofy and to keen on the teachings of Jesus to be a sacrelige, yet to poorly finaced, written, and choreograhped to be an award-winner. As a Vampire movie, it's no BLADE; as a martial arts movie, it's no ONG BAK; as a religious movie, it's no PASSION OF THE CHRIST.
But as a bad, bad, bad movie, it's no SOUL PLANE. Now that's a blessing from God if I've ever seen one.
Jesus of Nazereth (Phil Caracas) is in Ottawa, once again teaching people to love one another and be more spiritual. But vampires are running wild in Ottawa,able to withstand sunlight with human flesh graphted onto their bodies and Jesus decides to put off his spiritual quest to fight the vampires, who are particualry enamored by lesbians for blood. Armed with wooden stakes, some holy kung fu and allied with masked Mexican wrestlin Champ El Santo (Jeff Moffet), Jesus heads to the local barber shop for a shave and a hair cut. He aquires another ally in the form of Mary Magnum (Maria Moulton), and is now ready for action!!!
JESUS CHRIST VAMPIRE HUNTER is everything theaverage student film is: Poorly made, poorly written, hilariously entartinaing in it's sheer lack of anything that could be called a budget, etc. It's also intentionally funny and enterataing. The musical number, with Jesus rallying Canadians all over Ottawa to his cause while healing people of their various handicaps, is perfectly funny and captivating; apparantly, the filmmakers drew as much on JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR as they vampire and kung fu movies.
The martial arts sequences are another story. Being a blackbelt myself, I have long entertained the notion of Jesus as a martial artist. Even though in his life, there is no record of him having any martial arts training, his teachings make him, in my eyes, a true martial artist. But on the physical end of martial arts, Jesus is not too good. The big fight occurs in a big park full of people who completely ignore Jesus beating up an army of Atheists. Yes, that's right, Atheists, who come at him a waves of five (the movie's director, Lee Gordon Demabre, apparently thinks thirty-six people can fit into a jeep) and are defeated with Jesus giving some of the sloppiest kicks ever captured on film. The very fact the there is NOBODY in the movie who is any good, and EVERYBODY engages in fight after fight, is an amusing, hilarious, if boneheaded concept. The same can be said for the movie's narrator, and the spinning cross that comes as a direct reference the 1960's BATMAN series
But of course, you can't make a movie about Jesus without biblical messages, even if he is hunting vampires. Jesus actually talks to God through a bowl of cherries ("Call your mom; she misses you" the Almighty intones); He heals a vampire's throat after slitting it ("Not even this separates you from my love"); experiences a modern-day good samaritan experience first-hand; And gives a sermon on a mount. Jesus also questions why the vampires select lesbians for their skin-grafting experimnets; he is told that their deviant lifestyle makes them ir-redeemable in the eye's of the Church, so no pries will bother investigating this "Critical Lesbian Shortage". And Jesus says something I honesty suspect he would say about Gays, "There's nothing deviant about love." And trust me, I'm not Gay.
JESUS CHRIST VAMPIRE HUNTER is a movie that must be seen to be believed, not for it's martial arts action, not for it's messages about accepting gays as children of God, not for being a biblical movie, but for being definitive proof that any really, really bad movie can be funny, when it means to be, and when it doesn't.
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