Resurrected (2023)

I think it’s worth going into a bit of detail to properly convey how bonkers the beginning of this movie is, so the premise section will be longer this time.

Premise: Stanley is a really dumb dude that has a sort of addiction to constantly have his face staring back at him in any screen he’s got around. For example one thing he clearly loves to do is, instead of waiting five minutes, he will facetime his wife while driving back home and will spend the whole call making jokes and constantly moving the phone around instead of paying even a little attention to the road. This is with their kid in the car too. And of course Stan has another addiction he’s indulged in just minutes before:

So of course this initial scene ends with his wife watching how The Hubbie has an accident while on facetime and the kid obviously dies. That’s the first two minutes of the film but we’re already setting up the “maybe the main guy is not the type of guy I like to follow in a movie” stakes, huh?
But wait, there is more and it gets worse! It turns out the catholic church (you may know them as the bad guys that instead of liking satan and cool music are a bit too into kids) offers the family the opportunity of a lifetime: they will resurrect their kid with a SECRET ritual (red flag) that will bring him back from the dead! No strings attached! Just believe and be holy!
And would you believe it, it works! Or does it?! YES! IT WORKS! (spooky voice: but does it?). Also the drunk dad and the mom separate and he gets ordained as a catholic priest.

And this premise section only covered the first five minutes of the movie or so, friends, it’s all that intense and that’s why the Impeccable Taste HQ decided to go wall of text on you. Thank you and also you’re welcome. If you are not happy remember you can always leave a comme- WAIT there’s no comment section hahahaha, gottem.

Under 90 minutes? It goes over that for no reason.
Do they say the title? Oh yes, yes they do.

One sentence review: eh yeah this could have been a fun dumb movie but in the end it was a dumb movie that took a couple of its own plot beats a bit too seriously.
Okay, more: There’s some extremely campy, crappy bad acting on this movie and it is made even “worse” (worse can be better) because of course it’s part of that screenlife microgenre of found footage movies where everything we see comes from a computer/phone screen, at all times. So you get a TON of really close close ups of people doing the face your parents do on skype, which is accidentally hilarious and something that cool writers and directors can have a lot of fun with. Not this movie, though, this movie prefers to go for a Super High Stakes Conspiracy plot that keeps making you go “… what”. At the same time, the writer can’t make up their mind, the movie clearly clearly wants to say “you know, the catholic church? not the best guys”… but at the same time it sometimes go on a weird tangent like “but believing in jesus and being catholic yourself? cool stuff! only way we can have morals!”
This blog does not support depictions of The Nazarene where he’s painted on a good light so of course as soon as that kind of thing started to happen we all knew this movie wasn’t going to make it.
A simple way to improve it: So the main character’s son is called Nicholas, and once the movie gets moving and suspicious things start happening, they keep calling him Nicky or Nick. I am completely sure the writer thought they were very cute because of that whole “Old Nick is a nickname for the devil so i will make the audience wonder if that’s what we are going for here” thing. The smug bastard.
The thing is, while watching it I also noticed that they keep calling our horrible protagonist “Stan” instead of “Stanley” and wouldn’t it be an amazingly great movie if suddenly it turned out Stan the priest was SATAN OUR LORD AND MASTER?!

Probably not but I mean, it’s not like we’d lose much and it’d have the “oh fucking come on” factor going for it at the reveal.

Trivia about the IMDb trivia movie dialogue:

At some point our mess of a protagonist contacts a young girl (she’s an adult, don’t worry. I clarify this because we’re talking about a priest, after all) who is a HACKER! And when Father Stan asks her what’s her name, she instead gives him HER NICKNAME cause this is basically 1995’s Hackers. The nickname is “RAT”, and the following dialogue takes place:

[our hacker friend] call me Rat, by the way

[priestman] Rat… like the bubonic plague???

[hackerlady] what? no, d’uh, Rat like Remote Access Trojan

[loser priestman] oh, i guess it’s a hacker thing

I am amazed at the leap of logic that goes from “rat”, as in, the fun animal we’re all fans of, to THE BUBONIC PLAGUE. I am also extremely amused by how the really great writing on this movie makes the hacker roll her eyes while saying “remote access trojan” as if that should have been obvious.
I mean I would just have assumed she was given that nickname in high school because she had a uh ratlike way of eating lunch or something. Very rattish person.

This might qualify for the First Impeccable Taste Self Award for Longest Review to Date. It’s an exceptionaly bad movie that i will immediately forget about as soon as I publish this post, and this is the most self indulging blog ever!