💥 Trainwreck Gloria Tesch / Sofia Nova - Author of the Maradonia series turned Republithot

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I just finished watching it and I feel like I need a cigarette. This movie was GLORIOUS! It's rare to find a movie that hits the mark so perfectly on every single bad trope out there. Everything you don't want in a movie this one has.

You could be here forever going over every single point where this movie fails and still not be done with it. The dialogue is bad because let's face it, Glo Glo can't write for shit. The acting is bad because let's face it, most people in this movie can't act. The direction is bad because Dr. Gerry can't direct. But the most obvious thing is this movie suffers from "show, don't tell" syndrome. Instead of showing something the narrator goes on about it. Instead of showing that something is happening, the character mentions it and then immediately cuts to a scene of what they're talking about. Like when Glo Glo mentions the ravens. A good director would have build suspense by showing the ravens first. Maybe one up in a tree watching them. Or a flock of them watching, or circling. But no. Glo Glo, who I might add got second billing, has to say the line and then immediately cut to a shot of ravens.
 
Butta Face Lopez said:
Assuming that's Benjamin Tesch, he's credited as "Village Boy," which I assume is the kid who was crying over his dead mom...there's also a Jonathan Tesch credited as a skateboarder/Empire Guard/captain so I guess it was a whole family affair.
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Damn, then I guess total lack of acting talent is running in this family. Gloria and this crying kid were easily the worst actors in a movie full of terrible acting. That's quite an achievement.
 
Burn Book said:
Damn, then I guess total lack of acting talent is running in this family. Gloria and this crying kid were easily the worst actors in a movie full of terrible acting. That's quite an achievement.
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It's not just that but they're so obviously speaking with a that... Tesch accent when Joey is quite obviously not. It breaks some of the realism when two siblings wind up speaking differently even though they've been supposedly raised together.

Also, I'm convinced that Dr. Gerry had a small speaking role as one of the tormented but none of them were credited. Anybody else see that or is it just me?
 
Splendid Meat Sticks said:
We're watching this on movie night on Friday. It'll be the headliner.
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How do I get in on this?

Phil Ken Sebben said:
I just finished watching it and I feel like I need a cigarette. This movie was GLORIOUS! It's rare to find a movie that hits the mark so perfectly on every single bad trope out there. Everything you don't want in a movie this one has.

You could be here forever going over every single point where this movie fails and still not be done with it. The dialogue is bad because let's face it, Glo Glo can't write for shit. The acting is bad because let's face it, most people in this movie can't act. The direction is bad because Dr. Gerry can't direct. But the most obvious thing is this movie suffers from "show, don't tell" syndrome. Instead of showing something the narrator goes on about it. Instead of showing that something is happening, the character mentions it and then immediately cuts to a scene of what they're talking about. Like when Glo Glo mentions the ravens. A good director would have build suspense by showing the ravens first. Maybe one up in a tree watching them. Or a flock of them watching, or circling. But no. Glo Glo, who I might add got second billing, has to say the line and then immediately cut to a shot of ravens.
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The editing is definitely the worst. This movie suffers from both not enough scenes that should be in there and too many scenes that shouldn't. A girl comes up to Gloria at school who is supposedly her friend. Yet we never saw them meet. Similarly, we never saw Joey meet his 10 year old friends. After Gloria gets in a fight the scene just cuts to her and Joey the next day with no mention of her getting in trouble. That was even in the book but was presumably too much trouble for Gerry to film.

The other major problem with casting was a serious lack of extras, which made everywhere they went both in the real world and Maradonia look sparsely populated.

I thought Gerry was narrating at the end.

So here's the question: would you rather watch Maradonia or play Revolution 60?
 
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Maradontia said:
The editing is definitely the worst. This movie suffers from both not enough scenes that should be in there and too many scenes that shouldn't. A girl comes up to Gloria at school who is supposedly her friend. Yet we never saw them meet. Similarly, we never saw Joey meet his 10 year old friends. After Gloria gets in a fight the scene just cuts to her and Joey the next day with no mention of her getting in trouble. That was even in the book but was presumably too much trouble for Gerry to film.

The other major problem with casting was a serious lack of extras, which made everywhere they went both in the real world and Maradonia look sparsely populated.
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Yes, the editing is terrible. And yes, it could have used more extras. And as I said we could go on for hours picking on every single problem this movie had. This is like what you'd get if you took a bunch of people with no experience in any aspect of theater or film and put them on screen.

So here's the question: would you rather watch Maradonia or play Revolution 60?
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No idea as I've never really seen bits of Revolution 60, only stills.

The closest I can come to is comparing this to is "The Time Machine (I Found At a Yard Sale)". Same lack of direction, acting, editing and the like. But this movie was put out on the internet for the specific purpose of seeing if they could put it into wide release. Needless to say, it's a total piece of shit.

EEDIT: Okay I just managed to watch some gameplay from Revolution 60 and it looked like some of the most boring, generic shit I've ever seen. It's not even a video game. It's like somebody described what a video game was to somebody else who then based only on that made a game.

So yeah. I'd much rather watch the Maradonia movie again than play Revolution 60.
 
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Also, can anyone figure out what the "plot" is and what the connection is between Professor Epstein and Maradonia?

A girl is crying because her dad died on 9/11, and Professor Epstein tells her that his son also died on that day. Then she asks about why there's evil, and he says he'll explain it and starts reading from an "old history book" and tells the story of Apollyon. Apollyon is clearly Satan, having rebelled against the Light King who's clearly God.

Fine, Gerry's a Christian. But is he implying that 9/11 is caused by evil, that evil originates from Apollyon, and that Maya and Joey going to Maradonoia to kill Apollyon will end evil? Because if so, this story is already in an old book Professor Epstein is reading, and 9/11 still happened, so Apollyon must still be alive. So, Maya and Joey failed and the story is pointless.
 
Maradontia said:
Also, can anyone figure out what the "plot" is and what the connection is between Professor Epstein and Maradonia?

A girl is crying because her dad died on 9/11, and Professor Epstein tells her that his son also died on that day. Then she asks about why there's evil, and he says he'll explain it and starts reading from an "old history book" and tells the story of Apollyon. Apollyon is clearly Satan, having rebelled against the Light King who's clearly God.

Fine, Gerry's a Christian. But is he implying that 9/11 is caused by evil, that evil originates from Apollyon, and that Maya and Joey going to Maradonoia to kill Apollyon will end evil? Because if so, this story is already in an old book Professor Epstein is reading, and 9/11 still happened, so Apollyon must still be alive. So, Maya and Joey failed and the story is pointless.
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You're asking for sense and reason out of Glo Glo? She started this when she was just a kid. It's a pastiche of fantasy tropes and stuff that's been done before to better effect elsewhere.

My guess is they'll somehow defeat him, restore good to the land and be the heroes but evil can't ever truly be destroyed and only put to sleep for a while or something like that. Either that or what happens in Maradonia stays in Maradonia and Glo Glo... I mean Maya wakes up at the end and it's only been a dream.
 
Phil Ken Sebben said:
You're asking for sense and reason out of Glo Glo? She started this when she was just a kid. It's a pastiche of fantasy tropes and stuff that's been done before to better effect elsewhere.

My guess is they'll somehow defeat him, restore good to the land and be the heroes but evil can't ever truly be destroyed and only put to sleep for a while or something like that. Either that or what happens in Maradonia stays in Maradonia and Glo Glo... I mean Maya wakes up at the end and it's only been a dream.
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I believe the book series never got past part 4 of 7, and Gloria doesn't seem to be finishing it any time soon, so we may never know.

I do know based on sporkings that after the first book (which originally encompassed 7 Bridges and Escape from the Underworld until Gerry split it into 2 books for greed purposes), Maya and Joey go home and find that only a few hours have passed. They go to school the next week and Maya gets savagely beaten by Alana and the other bullies. She and Joey end up going back to Maradonia to defeat some other threat.

I forget what happens after (some people way earlier in this thread did reviews of some of the books, and conjugal felicity has them as well if you'd like to get a full plot synopsis), but that's book canon not movie canon. Gerry created a major plot hole by adding the Satan references.
 
Maradontia said:
How do I get in on this?
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lolcow.tv/r/autism on Friday. Starts around 5 PM EST. We won't be showing it right off the bat though. We'll air it once we start filling up.
 
I watched this and boy the final part really made me realize that this is the worst Christan movie ever lol.
 
We had some filmfag friends over this afternoon, and, just for my own personal lulz, I showed them Maradonia. The general consensus from four filmfags was that, if Gloria was under 18, she did good, but if she was over 18, she should be ashamed. They were also just as vexed by the 20+ minute intro as I was.

ICametoLurk said:
I watched this and boy the final part really made me realize that this is the worst Christan movie ever lol.
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The Maradonia Saga has the least Christian content possible, even less than the series that inspired it (The Chronicles of Narnia), which makes it a little less of a blow for other Christian movies.
 
glutenfreebooty said:
We had some filmfag friends over this afternoon, and, just for my own personal lulz, I showed them Maradonia. The general consensus from four filmfags was that, if Gloria was under 18, she did good, but if she was over 18, she should be ashamed. They were also just as vexed by the 20+ minute intro as I was.


The Maradonia Saga has the least Christian content possible, even less than the series that inspired it (The Chronicles of Narnia), which makes it a little less of a blow for other Christian movies.
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Gloria didn't make the movie. Gunter did and he's in his 50s at least.

The intro looks like footage from this trailer for the movie released a few years ago. It's like they didn't want to waste it so they just stuck it on the beginning.


There's more footage of Apollyon but this time there's a choir with him before they turn into the zombies we see in the film. He's also being played by a different guy.

Darin Ferraro who uploaded the clip is one of the Hoodmen by the way, so he's hardly starring in the film.

You can also see a different set of evil fairies.

The final cut seems to have been done by Vincent Leverenz so you can blame him for the shitty editing.

 
The only editing that would possibly improve Maradonia the movie would be to just dump everything in the garbage. Maradonia is such a mess of a book series that there is no true way to improve it. You could increase the budget, edit the dialog, cut scenes, and create new ones to make things look nicer, sound better (or at least sound like it was written by a real person and not an alien) and have the plot run smoother. At the end of the day though it'd still be a shit movie with a dull, unoriginal plot and a bizarre mishmash of ideas.
 
So okay-- someone help me here--

Maya and Joey come to new school. Maya beats the shit out of a bully cause she's shy? And then she almost dies in a pool. Sees a mermaid. They go out to the beach, find a cave, go back out to the beach again, and go in the cave. Meet a dwarf, chased by someone and then meet a snake, and then meet a woman, and the woman doesn't like the snake and then they meet an old man and they meet three old women who are annoying, and the old man helps them meet another old dude with some young women who grunt.

Then the second old man tells them to lead an army, and the first old man takes them to another woman who doesn't like them. Second woman goes to a man who yells about Gary (?). Gary helps her poison the two kids, but Joey is told by first woman not to get poisoned. So woman who doesnt like them gets poisoned instead.

Then the three women come back and are like "kill yourselves and we'll quit." The kids are like sure lets burn to death. They do and then a magic chunky guy shows up and says a poem and they come back to life. Chunky guy fights some people on a beach, then the kids take a carriage to a badly made cgi city which is really a wildlife preserve so the audio is just birds screaming in pain instead of whatever the fuck the king said.

They meet another chunky guy in armor get on horses and go to a pool of blood where they get kinda incesty for a bit. And I wonder why her dad needed to shoot this scene.

And then there's ravens.

And then there's a dragon for some reason?

And then they get a milk maids invisible hat.

And then there's 20 minutes of people growling about war?


That's the movie right? This is what they rented a theater out for and showed to a crowd?
 
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Not that the first edition of the book was any better but at least it had talking animals and some awful-yet-hilarious italicized and capitalized one-liners...

Food effect's your Mood!
What is this diabolical offer?
Everything what lives has Eyes, Ears and a Voice!
Failure to prepare is preparation to fail!

and other such ridiculous things like Apollyon's mermaid water park, the 2000 unicorns he keeps and the fact the Club of Evil convenes to plot against those two kids and sing the Mother Earth song after their meetings.
 
I'm trying to figure out the frame story, so the old substitute art professor is reading an ancient history book about another universe, which has two kids from his own universe in it, so it's also the past? Are Joey and Maya from the same reality and time as professor shitty wig?

If so who wrote the book, then took it to earth and put it in a book shop for professor "9/11 is a complicated thing" to find?

And that would make it a history book about the future?
 
Watched this last night and holy toledo, I'm going to be chuckling about it all day. It'd been so many years since I saw the first trailer for this and I kinda lost sight of how batshit insane these people truly are.

I almost can't wrap my head around it. This was how many years in production? They went how deeply in debt to finance this? Yet this was still the best they could come up with. And god bless them for it, because this movie is a gift.
 
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