Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
Washed-up Hollywood stars battle the antichrist, and his smooth-talking liberal minions, in the wacky parallel universe of "end-times" Christian movies.
Sep 3, 2002 | In the "Apocalypse" movies, the rapture has come and gone, calling home the Christian right and leaving everyone else to suffer under the rule of the antichrist. While the gold-encrusted studios of the Trinity Broadcasting Network can be assumed to be silent as tombs, all is not lost. TBN footage has survived, offering words of advice for those "left behind," presented by neighborly doomsday advisors Jack Van Impe and his wife Rexella.
The Van Impes have, of course, personally ascended to heaven, but a ragtag band of fugitive evangelists, who include Mr. T, use a stolen news van to hack into Satan's satellite network and broadcast this pirate signal. It's enough to make the antichrist, Nick Macalusso (Nick Mancuso) lose his cool: "Why can't you idiots stop these treasonous transmissions?" he roars at his henchmen.
Scientologist John Travolta gave us "Battlefield Earth," which begins with a note to the effect that "humans are an endangered species." And a host of B-list Hollywood stars have given us "Apocalypse" and its three sequels -- "Revelation," "Tribulation" and "Judgment" -- in which fundamentalist Christians are the endangered species.
The movies are the brainchild of Canadian televangelists Paul and Peter Lalonde. With 4.5 million videos sold, the Lalondes are moguls in a world rarely glimpsed by secular eyes: the parallel, semi-star-studded universe of Christian exploitation filmmaking. Here, actors from Judd Nelson to Louis Gossett Jr., as well as plots scavenged from "The Fast and the Furious" and "The Matrix," find second lives in straight-to-video proselytizing adventures.
The "Apocalypse" films are similar to the hot-selling "Left Behind" novels, and in fact the Lalondes also produced "Left Behind: The Movie," with a straight-to-video sequel due in October. As in "Left Behind," it turns out the United Nations is the ideal framework for Satan's One Nation Earth (ONE) regime. The antichrist wins his throne by promising to end hatred, prejudice and other things of which bleeding-heart liberals are always accusing the folks on TBN. And, besides which -- hey, what's Corbin Bernsen from "L.A. Law" doing here?
In the most recent "Apocalypse" sequel, "Judgment" (ad slogan: "The Supreme Court vs. the Supreme Being!"), Bernsen plays a reluctant attorney defending a holdout Christian who has been put on trial by ONE for "hatred of the human race." In this show trial, the prosecutor is telling the upright Christian (the statuesque, English-accented Leigh Lewis): "The rest of the one world is paddling in one direction. And you're against this!"
Do the filmmakers feel that American society has already left them behind? A vaguely gay-baiting hipster character (he addresses the male bailiff as "handsome") takes the stand to hail "my man Lucifer." As for Bernsen, he just wishes his client would renounce her pesky faith. "I suppose your God is going to come rescue you!" he sneers.
It's not the Almighty who is going to rescue her. But when a typically impulsive Mr. T. proclaims, "They want fire and brimstone, they're gonna get it!" and plans a jailbreak against all odds, it becomes unclear just how much of this is gospel.
"We're not saying, 'This is what's going to happen,'" says director André van Heerden. With five films for the Lalondes' Cloud Ten Pictures to his name since 1999, he's been called the Steven Spielberg of Christian movies.
The original 1999 "Apocalypse" movie -- van Heerden was assistant director on that one, under Peter Gerretsen -- was billed by Cloud Ten as "so powerful, so timely, and so Biblically accurate that you will be gasping for breath from the very first frame of the movie." But van Heerden, comparing his movies to George Orwell's "1984," says it would be fairer to call them allegories. He says they're meant as much to dramatize the struggle of Christian life as to predict how the world ends. And the U.N., he says, is just thrown in there for purposes of sci-fi "verisimilitude."
Let's be frank. These are movies backed by people who hate the U.N., right? "Hate is probably too strong a word," says van Heerden, who prefers "disagree with."
Rapture movies date back to 1972, when Des Moines, Iowa-based Mark IV Productions issued "A Thief in the Night." Made before the time of mid-budget Christian movies, "Thief" offers a low-rent view of the end times. In it, Iowans flee from the red-and-orange-striped vans of another hypothetical world government, UNITE.
As for Christian allegory, it's as old as the Middle Ages, when the title character of "Everyman" met characters like Death, God and Good Deeds. His long journey symbolized the progress of every pilgrim resisting evil and tribulation. So it is in fundamentalist moviemaking. Facing slander as "those religious nuts," Christians are challenged to resist the lure of the Internet, the liberal media, swarthy types, international treaties, lusty female TV reporters and other pitfalls of modern life. Members of the world's largest faith are seen as persecuted victims, in a view of the world that would not faze Ann Coulter.
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