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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Only In Celebration Do We Go Beyond The Circle Of Life And Death" ~ Teenage Musings On Death And The Afterlife, February 11, 2007
The first thing you'll notice about this movie is that it views like a very low budget high school student film project. However this is not a film that should be judged by its production values or level of acting ability. When you discover that the script was written in its entirety by fourteen year old Celeste Davis (who bears a striking resemblance to ex-olympic figure skater Tonya Harding) who also stars in the lead role of recently departed suicide victim Silver Strand, you'll begin to realize what a remarkable achievement this movie truly is.
Synopsis: Silver departs this world to find herself in Purgatory House, kind of a halfway home for teenage suicides. Each occupant has their own room that is exactly like the one they left on earth, equipped with all the same belongings and wardrobe they left behind. Not only that, but they are also supplied with a limitless amount of the drugs of their choice. Who could ask for anything more?
However there are also hard lessons to be learned in Purgatory, one of the most difficult is mandatory viewing of earthTV via a large big screen television mounted on the wall of each bedroom. Here they are forced to observe the ongoing life on earth of family and friends in order to see and understand how their choice to end their own life has impacted others.
'Purgatory House' is a pleasant surprise containing some very inventive thoughts, considerations and situations. It also deals with a number of crucial problems facing todays teenagers; suicide, addiction, school violence and unwanted pregnancy. Imagine, all this from the mind of a fourteen year old.
P.S.: Don't forget to watch the two featurettes; 'The Making of Purgatory House' and 'Putting It All Together.' They go a long way in putting the project in perspective and definitely raise the film to a higher level. This movie should be required viewing in every high school in America.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
absolutely horrible, June 5, 2009
This movie was terrible. It feels like a badly made after school special. I have actually seen after school specials better than this. The movie attempts to show depressed kids who are addicted to drugs and sex, but it is obvious that at the time of writing this the girl had absolutely no experience with those things. I got the feeling that the writer was just a cheesy teen angsty emo kid who wrote a movie that only got good reviews because adults think that it has a good message because this is how kids actually are. Plus she was 14 when she wrote it, so people were impressed I guess because they didn't think a 14 year old was capable of writing a movie. I have met several 14 year olds who could have written a much better movie than this; this girl obviously just got lucky.
The acting in this movie was pretty terrible. Saint Peter was okay, but all of the other actors were very poor. The soundtrack was also bad. There were one or two songs that were good, but a good part of the soundtrack consisted of horrible covers of songs that were already horrible in the first place.
The main characters voice was like fingernails on a chalkboard to me; it was the equivalent of listening to a valley girl emo kid, which is just disturbing. She was an obnoxious, self-centered brat who seems like the type to talk about killing herself for no reason other than to get attention. This movie is an insult to kids who really are depressed, and not just whining because they have the same teen angst that every teenager in the country has.
The premise of the movie didn't even make sense. These kids go to purgatory because they killed themselves, and they act like purgatory is this horrible, awful place. Yet purgatory is a place where all they do all day is do drugs and whatever else they want, which would be heaven for these people. I have known people like these kids, and if they thought that killing themselves would have gotten them into a place like that, they would have killed themselves years ago.
The only redeeming quality of this movie was the fact that this girl actually reminds me of someone I know, which made the movie amusing. Every time she would say something pathetic and cheesy it would make me laugh because I of how similar she was to my twenty-six year old friend. Even the drag queen that played god was sub-par.
Notice that almost every good review of this movie says something like "What if this were your child?" or "As a parent, I think this movie is so important and every teenager should see this". The only people who think this movie is good are adults who for some reason think this is how 14 year old kids in the suburbs act. They like it because this is the same kind of crap they would write to try to show their children. I don't even think most teenagers would enjoy this movie.
I would suggest that if you want to see a GOOD movie about people who have killed themselves, watch "Wristcutters." It was made by people with talent. If you want to scare your kids straight try "Kids" or "The Girl Next Door." This movie is about as realistic and valid as "The Doom Generation," but without all the amusing violence. In conclusion, "Purgatory House" is the reason that there aren't many movies written by 14 year olds.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
This is the movie Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen" should have been., June 1, 2009
Purgatory House (Cindy Baer, 2004)
A few years back, there was a sensation about a gritty, hard-hitting script written by a thirteen-year-old girl. It was immediately snapped up by Hollywood, filmed with the cream of the B-list, and released with the highest of expectations. The movie was called Thirteen, and the end result was mediocre in every way. Well, every way that it wasn't godawful. There was one silver lining to that particular cloud, however; since then, a number of movies scripted by teenage girls have gotten funding, however little it may have been, and those movies have been released. To a film, every one of them I've seen has been miles better than Thirteen. Of course, since the formula failed once in Hollywood, the industry has ignored them since, forcing the filmmakers to go through independent channels for production and distribution. One of the earliest of these films was Purgatory House, which traded the gritty-realism factor for a kind of fuzzy fantasy, and because of that, paradoxically ended up being far more realistic, not to mention much better.
Purgatory House is the story of Silver Strand (screenwriter Celeste Davis in her first film role), who, as the movie opens, has just died. How, we do not know, and she does not remember. (Part of the underlying mystery of the movie is how she died, which is revealed to us in stages as Silver recovers her memories.) She finds herself in Purgatory House, which Catholics will immediately recognize; Purgatory, in Catholic doctrine, is the area between heaven and hell where souls go who are still being judged. Purgatory House is presided over by Saint James (Jim Hanks, from XTRO 3: Watch the Skies), a combination of saint, therapist, and administrator who tries to help the house's inhabitants understand why they died and what their deaths mean to those back in the real world, which the kids watch through TV-like monitors. (This, in fact, takes the place of much of the schoolwork they'd be doing were they still alive; there are assignments, tests, etc.) As the place is a house full of teenagers, the interpersonal relationships are fleeting, strong, and fraught with drama, and the kids are constantly testing James' rules. Silver's internal struggles are symbolized through a number of dreams she has, each enacted with Davis' script's cynical humor and fantastic (in the "fantasy" sense of the term) imagery; the "God's quiz show" dream will stay with viewers for a long, long time. Eventually, we get the whole story (and Silver is as surprised as we are), and Silver has a choice--continue on in Purgatory House, or find the power within herself to change.
If you've seen Thirteen, it's pretty much impossible to avoid comparing the two. (Equally so with Emily Hagens' more recent horror flick Pathogen.) Unlike Thirteen, pretty much everyone involved in Purgatory House was an amateur; first-time director Baer has spent her Hollywood career in front of the camera, most of the young cast members were first-time actors, etc. This obviously lends the movie an indie feel, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending, and often whether it's good or bad depends on the script. While Davis, being thirteen at the time she wrote this, tends to hit us over the head with some things a more accomplished screenwriter would have swept a little farther under the rug, for the most part this is a solid script that's a great deal more subtle than expected; Davis does understand the power of allegory, even if she doesn't quite trust the viewer enough to really allow us to draw our own conclusions. Given some age and more screenwriting experience, I expect very good things from this talented young writer, and she's not a bad actress, either.
A pleasant surprise, definitely worth a rental. *** ½
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