In an unusual marketing move, Cloud Ten Pictures, the folks who produced this screen treatment of the first in Jerry Jenkins’ and Tim LaHaye’s bestselling series of literalistic Biblical prophecy novels, have released it on video prior to a cinematic run early next year. They’d like to drum up good word-of-mouth in the evangelical community before then, in hopes of making an even bigger impact at the boxoffice than did the similarly themed, hopelessly laughable Omega Code last winter.
Now, I’m fully aware that those who for one reason or another swap sides on an issue are often the most virulent opponents to their former viewpoint. Ex-smokers, fat people-turned-marathon runners, bisexuals, and reformed Republicrats can all be downright obnoxious. And I know that, as a wayward BJU Bible major who puts the “NO” in “agnostic,” my current free-thinking rhetoric sometimes gets out of hand too. But I’m going to encourage everyone in my acquaintance to rent this cheesy, preachy, didactic thing, experience firsthand how earthshakingly, nose-bleedingly, stomach-churningly awful it is, and hope they’ll join me in mounting a counter-campaign to keep it in video stores where it belongs.
Because, if you don’t have to pay the full price of a theater ticket for the privilege, Left Behind could be considered entertaining, in “MST3K” fashion. “Growing Pains” star Kirk Cameron plays Buck Williams, a cable-news reporter who happens to be in Israel during a mass surprise attack by Iraq and Syria. Even though, last I heard, those countries have so few military friends these days they couldn’t put on a decent airshow, and would probably have to roll across the desert in grocery carts, wave after wave of computer-animated jets flies overhead. Buck takes refuge in the top-secret underground Israeli air defense bunker (which conveniently happens to be right next to the wheat field where he’s filming, where they just let him in) to watch the radar screens along with the hopeless personnel inside, when suddenly every invading jet, miraculously and without reason, explodes and falls out of the sky. (We will later learn that, a couple thousand years ago, God expressed in the Book of Ezekiel a distaste for Russian-built airplanes.)
A few hours later, square-jawed Chicago airline pilot Rayford Steele (Brad Johnson, who in 1990 was named by People as one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the world but hadn’t had a movie I’ve seen since that year’s Flight of the Intruder) is winging to London (seated in what is just barely an improvement on the cardboard cockpit from Plan 9 from Outer Space) when suddenly all the children onboard, and some adults, vanish right out of their clothes. Nobody sees anything, no angelic shouts or trumpets, nuthin’. Rayford gets the panic-stricken airliner back on the ground and goes home to learn his devout wife and young son have vanished out of their clothes too (his college-bound daughter is still around though; she must be a pagan, because her nose is pierced). Then he goes to the abandoned church and finds the left-behind associate pastor (“there’s a big difference between knowing and believing”) watching a videotape the now-missing pastor made a three years earlier which explains that, when all this stuff happens, it’s because God has raptured the born-again believers (and children, who are too young to know the difference between right and wront) up to heaven.
Everybody else calms down, accepts the government explanation that it was caused by radiation (?), and as soon as the phone companies have replaced their missing operators, it’s business as usual – albeit a little less crowded here in the capital of the Christian world (it seems we are to infer, however, that all Internet service providers are pagans also, since the web never so much as hiccups). Meanwhile, Buck (who, now that I think of it, is actually appropriately named, since this campy mess resembles nothing more than a 1930s Buck Rogers serial) learns that the new U.N. Secretary General, Nikolai Carpathia (?), is really the Antichrist. He knows this because the Antichrist appears to him as the only person who’s black and white in a color scene. Buck is blessed with this insight after having a somewhat tardy religious conversion (along with Rayford and daughter, who loses the nose ring), and as seven years of Tribulation are set to begin, he is set up to be God’s secret agent in Carpathia’s inner circle. Kirk comes on after the end credits and makes a plea for everyone to talk up this “most important story ever told” so it can be a big hit and so that Hollywood will finance the sequels.
Yeeha. God Wars.
There are now eight books in the Left Behind series (it seems, like “M*A*S*H, the fictionalization of the event may take longer than the event itself). Unless you want more of these movies clogging an already quality-starved theater schedule in coming years, complain to Jack Valenti or Roger Ebert or the Pope now. Get mad, get out there, and get even with everybody who was instrumental in keeping The Last Temptation of Christ from coming to the Upstate back in 1988. F
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