Faith Based (Vincent Masciale, 2019): USA

Reviewed by Kirsten Anderberg. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2020.

Hallelujah! “Faith Based,” a film directed by Vincent Masciale, may not be able to stop sin, but it may slow it down with bigger, better, more original sins (to paraphrase the irreverent reverends Rob Brezsny and Flip Wilson)! Can I get an Amen? Amen for Faith Based original sins! With a “Spinal Tap” treatment for Christianity, and a fictional film director with credentials from the “Oxnard School for the Cinematic Arts” (a joke made for the Santa Barbara area), this comedy will have you singing verses from Tom Lehrer’s “Vatican Rag” before you can exit your pew.

“I looked back at the footprints in the sand. I noticed that at many times along the path of my life, especially at the very lowest and saddest times, there was only one set of footprints.” And now in “Faith Based,” we see Luke and Tanner, riding on the shoulders of Kirk Cameron, in their moneymaking devout alien sacrament of a film, “A Prayer in Space.” Luke and Tanner, working out of a rental in the sacred San Fernando Valley, walk in the footprints of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson and Brother Leroy (Flip Wilson) and the Church of What’s Happening Now. Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, a Los Angeles-based preacher/evangelist in the 1920s-1930s used to ask for “quiet money” (as opposed to noisy coins) on days when she had headaches: a premise Luke and Tanner could surely appreciate.

As far as Christian comedy spoofs go, “Faith Based” is heaven on earth. I liked this much better than the heavy “Life of Brian” by Monty Python, and the divinely inspired songwriting in “Faith Based” gives the song “Every Sperm is Sacred” from Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life,” a good run for its money. Kids will surely be shorting the collection baskets at church to pay for the digital download of the “Faith Based” theme song once it is available. This catchy rockin’ hymn boldly compares cross sizes (ah-men!) and exalts a dangerous, crushing 8 foot cross over the singer’s bed, keeping him safe at night.

I feel compelled to use words from a prayer by the great pronoiac Rob Brezsny to describe “Faith Based.” The film is a “greedy, healing ritual disciplined enough to go crazy in the name of creation, not destruction. It awakens in us the power to do the half-right thing when it is impossible to do the totally right thing.” It is “exuberantly elegant, shockingly friendly, fanatically balanced, blasphemously reverent, mysteriously truthful, lyrically logical, and blissfully rowdy.”

Sprinkled with completely over-the-top, flamboyant performances by stars such as Margaret Cho and Jason Alexander, and absolved of any questionable motives by the end of this feel good movie, “Faith Based” is redemptive. I highly recommend “Faith Based,” along with a swig of holy water (you boiled the hell out of) and perhaps a cigarette and bath once it is over.