Deceived (2002)
In a remote space observatory perched high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, a needle frantically scratches erratic lines on a strip chart recorder confirming an extraterrestrial signal. Emmett Shaw, the powerful, charismatic billionaire who owns the observatory, rushes to the station, hungry to expose the discovery. This is the biggest moment in human history and he is the man responsible for it all. With the goal of immediately sharing the signal with the entire world, he brings along two leading journalists--Kara Walsh, an extremely attractive, top-notch investigative reporter who begrudgingly owes her career to Shaw, and Reverend Fletcher, a new age visionary with the hottest radio show in the country. Also accompanying Shaw is Jack Jones, a scruffy but brilliant computer technician whose pessimistic and often sarcastic attitude ruffles many feathers in the group--especially Smitty's, the program director, who happens to be Jack's ex-girlfriend and the only Christian in the group.
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I gave 'Left Behind' a chance and didn't get 30 minutes into it. In that movie the acting was horrid and the situations strained to become credible. So, it was with great reluctance that I came to 'Deceived'. This time the acting wasn't horrid and the situations didn't try so hard to beat me over the head. In fact, this was no better or worse than an average X-files episode including the speculative ending. The Christian message was inserted here and there but it seemed to become part of the story rather than try to take over the story. There are logic gaps that need explaining. It was nothing too distracting though and if you accept this as a standard B-pic you can actually sit back, relax and be entertained.
I am a Christian. I believe Jesus is the son of the living God, the only begotten of the Father and the only name whereby we can be saved. And I believe this movie stank!The movie's theme was the broadcast from the pseudo-extraterrestrial source that really was evil. Strange and horrible things happen. We see the evil of government, the evils of telepathy and mind control and the evil of phony religion and the evil of phony news broadcasters, and in the end the cute couple are saved (physically as well as spiritually) and make it through just fine. They even make a convert.And it was still BAD.Lou Gossett was just utterly wasted. I do hope they paid him double. The rest were cheap Canadian actors.
Well, it can be truly horrifically bad, as in "Battlefield Earth". Or it can be stupidly cheaply exploitatively bad, as in "Attack of the Giant Leeches". Or, it can be painfully embarrassingly bad as in "Face the Music". "Deceived" is innovative in that it creates a new kind of bad, cheap certainly but in a preachy posing altruisticaly bad way. It's as if the actors, most of whom are at least competent, sacrifice themselves for the good of the cause, saying words and performing actions that must have caused their thespian guts to wring themselves inside out. Still they trooped on and we have the result. There's enough camp to make it watchable, sort of, and of course with this kind of thing there's always curiousity about just how far down the road to "Plan 9..." it will go. The answer is quite a ways.
This pretty much fits into the realm of the B budget sci-fi category. The brand name actors do an ok job but they fall victim to the script at hand. I would advise most people to avoid this film since they probably don't have the appetite for the preachings put forth in the film.Before seeing this movie, I had no idea that a Christian Film genre even existed. I will probably not sleep well tonight knowing that it does. It's not nice to sugarcoat your brainwashing, people.