BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

LouHomey From my favorite movies..

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

SnoopyStyle Army veteran Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif) returns to the South after the war to find his abandoned crumbling ancestral home. His grandfather (John Huston) was a preacher. He's wounded but doesn't want people to know where. He intends to do something he's never done before. He hates to be called a preacher. He encounters blind street preacher Asa Hawks (Harry Dean Stanton) and his daughter Sabbath Lily Hawks (Amy Wright). He counters by preaching his own Church of Truth Without Christ Cruxified. He is hounded by Enoch Emory (Dan Shor) who claims to have wise blood. He buys an old rundown car to sleep in. He follows the blind preacher's daughter.There is a surrealism to all of it like the characters are not of this world. All of them are a bit off. Brad Dourif creates one of the most eccentric angry character that is still compelling to watch. This is such an off-kilter group. I'm fascinated enough to follow his meandering journey. There are some terrific supporting actors delivering wonderful performances.

tieman64 Directed by John Huston, "Wise Blood" is an adaptation of a 1952 Flannery O'Connor novel of the same name. It stars Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes, the grandson of a staunch Christian. When he returns to the American South after World War 2, Hazel decides to start a church of his own.Huston's film largely omits what made O'Connor's novel memorable. O'Connor, who wrestled with her own Catholicism, set her tale in a racist, puritanical, post-war America. Moulded by religious family members, her characters saw themselves as being "unclean" and "guilty of sin". The faintest desires, the slightest sexual acts, sent O'Connor's characters into a tailspin, each viewing themselves as having committed a transgression against God.But O'Connor's novel went beyond simple Catholic Guilt. Culturally indoctrinated to view African Americans as being "unclean", O'Connor's guilt-ridden characters begin to view themselves as being "black". Self-identifying with African Americans, they perceive themselves as being tarred, blighted, outcasts and so intrinsically unworthy. O'Connor then drew parallels between slavery and Christianity; both were methods of inculcating obedience. Both promised redemption only after impossible, and obscene, forms of discipline.John Huston's "Wise Blood" touches upon these themes. Huston's characters try to reject God, they put stones in their shoes as penance and wear gorilla costumes as a form of quasi-racist punishment. More shockingly, they gouge out their eyeballs and lacerate their own bodies. But as Huston's film is obviously set in the racially integrated 1970s, and as it makes no attempts to convey the mood, mannerisms and psycho-social realities of the 1940s, these themes feel half-baked. In subtle ways, the Bible Belt of 1979 was not the Bible Belt of 1948. Huston either doesn't care about these subtleties, or honestly expects us to believe that his film is set in the 1940s.7.9/10 – Flawed but fascinating. See "Elmer Gantry".

MikeMagi A hefty percentage of the comments on "Wise Blood" dwell on its relationship to the novel from which it was drawn -- pro and con. Brilliant faithful adaptation says one moviegoer. Trashy sacrilege screams another. Those of us who haven't read the book are stuck with the movie which balances superb atmosphere with strange storytelling. Let's start on the plus side. John Huston and his crew have caught not only the look but the feel, almost the smell, of a midsize southern town in Summer. The weathered frame houses, the sagging streets, the one-screen cinema, the tired used car lot with its rusty Ford Fairlanes, they form a richly authentic backdrop for the action. That's where "Wise Blood" gets into trouble. Who is Hazel,played by Brad Dourif, what war did he emerge from, why does he want to be a preacher and most of all, why does he suffer psychotic temper tantrums? You'll have to figure that out for yourself -- along with why a would-be acolyte steals an embalmed monkey for him and why the nymphet daughter of a "blind" evangelist is smitten with him, down to her threadbare stockings. Sure, there are allegorical references galore throughout the film. The phoniness of Gonga, the gorilla (a bruiser in an ape suit) matched against the phoniness of street corner preachers. But in the end, maybe you'll say to yourself (but never breathe a word to more ephemeral friends)I just wish the darned thing made more sense.

Kenneth Anderson When novels are adapted by writers who know the book so well that they are unable to see past their familiarity to judgeif the screenplay stands on its own as a cohesive, compelling story with three acts and understandable character motivations, the result is something like John Huston's "Wise Blood." A movie so academically faithful to its source material that it fails miserably as a motion picture that makes any narrative sense.As a companion piece to Flannery O'Connor's novel, it is a fine visual representation of the characters and events recounted. As a stand alone film, it virtually makes no sense and things happen only because the book says so, not because the film gives them any organic reason to.I defy anyone who hasn't read the book to make any sense out of the character of Enoch Emory. Likewise the origins of the matrimonial feelings of the boarding house landlady. Both parts are well acted, but the writers leave in all the novel's "business" and are hamstrung at finding a way to convey the motivations behind them.The best things about the film are Brad Dourif and Amy Wright. Dourif especially works miracles with a character that is underwritten on the screen but vivid on the page. In fact, most of the cast works extremely hard to bring some humanity to their characters, but they are ill-served by a script that fails to understand the special considerations required of telling a story on film and telling one on the page. The screenwriter obviously held O'Connor in such awe that he was afraid to do any thinking on his own.