Directors: Andrew Janczak, Tom DeSimone, and Alex Graton
Writers: Richard Ogilvie and Enrique Torres Tudela
From: Cult Cinema, Pure Terror (only 4 remain!)
A boy flying to see his mother in Rio becomes the center of several adventures as the plane crashes and he’s rescued by villagers who think he’s the son of their god.
Opens with a precocious child running across a beach and waving good-bye to a duck. Oh boy, am I going to love this flick?! No. No I’m not.
I’d complain about the child, because he’s pretty annoying, but I can’t really blame him. He looks to be about four years old, which by definition means he can't act, but he's crying in just about every shot. I sincerely suspect the producers smacked him just before every take. Keep that image in your head because it sums up the moral tone of this picture.
Yes. It is Christian propaganda. How did you guess?
Anyway, the kid is flying on a plane to Rio to see his mom because his parents might be getting a divorce. Shock and horror! How could such a thing happen? I don’t know because the mother never appears in the film. A series of wa-acky personalities are also on board—an aspiring actress, a groovy band, and a woman who allegedly murdered her husband and stole all his money. Also two nuns with a coffin, one of whom comforts the alleged murderess.
We get a little bit of these characters talking to each other on the plane, but that doesn’t matter because the plane is going to crash and I hope y’all are ready for high comedy! This is hands-down the best part of the movie. People are tossing luggage to help the plane stay airborne and one of the nuns falls out of the plane! But we’re not done! The plane crashes in the Amazon, everyone starts jumping in the water, but they’re all attacked by alligators! The kid is thrown into the river by the staff who promise they’ll follow in a moment, but the plane explodes killing them all! Of the entire flight, all that’s left is this little kid floating down the river in a coffin with his stuffed tiger. Sobbing and calling out for his daddy.
I was laughing and laughing and thought I would never stop.
Unfortunately the movie hits the brakes hard at this point. The kid flags down a plane, but his would-be rescuers are attacked by locals who take the kid instead. One faction wants to sacrifice him to their god. The other faction thinks, because of his blond hair, that he’s the son of their god. The king agrees with the second faction when he sees a halo around the boy’s head. The leader of the first faction really wants to sacrifice him, though, so he keeps working on the king until he agrees to maybe think about agreeing to it. Dude takes that as a yes and arranges to have the kid sacrificed. Just before the priest is about to put the knife in, he sees the halo around the kid’s head and refuses. So the faction leader kills the priest.
At this point, members of the second faction arrive and set the village and temple on fire. Someone escapes with the kid and the king refuses to do anything because he’s found a god stronger than INTI, somehow. So he gets killed. Meanwhile, leader of the first faction is chasing after the kid.
While all this is going on, the dad has flown down, visited the local Catholic church, and asked them for help—not the government or airline. He’s eventually led to a village the day before his son is supposed to be sacrificed and sees the villagers seemingly convert to Catholicism and agree to help find his son. Then they hit a certain point in the jungle and the villagers tell him and his priest friends that they’re on their own.
So the kid is being chased, drops his stuffed tiger, and the man chasing him finds it. The tiger transforms—first into a different stuffed tiger and then into a giant stuffed cheetah which, depending on the shot periodically transforms into a real cheetah. The man is attacked and killed by the beast, declaring with his dying breathe that the boy is the son of god. INTI, not Jehovah. That'd be blasphemous.
Kid is running, falls into quicksand, and calls for dad. Dad hears him, finds him, and saves him. As the two walk away, the pilot and priest who’d been traveling with them marvel at the fact that everyone on the plane except the kid died. The priest says, “The lord moves in mysterious ways to perform his miracles.” THE END
HOW MANY DIED SO THIS BOY COULD LIVE? It’s sort of like people talking about “God-incidences” in regard to 9/11. “I was supposed to work in the towers that day, but slept through my alarm. God specifically saved me while letting 3,000 of my friends and co-workers die in a horrifying way. Truly God is good.” By the way, I’m not making that up.
The movie is saying, directly, that God specifically reached out to protect this child (and none of the other people in the movie including the two priests who died in their effort to save him), but protect him from what? Living with his divorced mother? Quelle horreur.
The movie is just dull and weird for it’s final hour. Sure, you can laugh at the production values—all the actors look like recruits from a community theater troupe whose only membership requirement was “BYO shitty wig”—but that’s such a short, fleeting pleasure. Really, there’s about 15 solid minutes in this movie: minutes 15-30. That’s when they start making preparations for the plane to crash and all the hilarious deaths occur. After that, it’s just the locals sitting around giving the kid dirty looks and the dad traveling to find the priest who knows where the village is. If you can find a copy, just jump to the 15 minute mark and turn it off when the kid is weeping in the coffin. I doubt you’ll have a more joyful cinematic experience this year than that. Beyond that chunk, skip it.
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