October Positivity: Revelation Road 2: The Sea of Glass and Fire (dir by Gabriel Sabloff)

Posted on October 27, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Eric Roberts is in this!

That, in itself, isn’t a surprise. Eric Roberts was also in the first Revelation Road. He plays the same role in the 2013 sequel. Roberts is Sheriff Jenson, the not particularly religious sheriff who has to deal with a town that’s gone mad in the wake of the Rapture. Over the course of one night, dozens of people (including Jenson’s mother) vanished as their souls flew into the air. Jenson isn’t sure what happened but he knows that there is panic in the streets and that there is also a crazed motorcycle gang to deal with. In the first film, Roberts was onscreen for maybe two minutes. He gets closer to five minutes in Revelation Road 2 and you know what? it’s always nice to see Eric Roberts!

As for the rest of the film, it picks up where the previous one ended. Josh McManus (David A.R. White) is trying to get home to his family while also resisting the urge to become a killer. It’s not easy. Flashbacks reveal that Josh was actually brainwashed by the CIA to be a remorseless killer. He’s haunted by a mission in the Middle East and the amount of people he killed over there. He’s joined in his drive home by Beth (Noelle Coet), a teenage girl who has been sent by Jesus himself (Bruce Marchiano) to help guide Josh in the right direction. Pursuing Josh is the fearsome Hawg (Brian Bosworth), a motorcycle gang leader who is haunted by his own personal tragedy. Hawg’s daughter, Cat (Andrea Logan White), struggles to understand her father’s anger and hatred.

Revelation Road 2 is a definite improvement over the first film. If the first film seemed to take forever to go nowhere, Revelation Road 2 is all about Josh’s determination to get back home. Once he starts that car up, nothing is going to stop him. If the first film seemed to be a bit too eager to show off Josh’s talent for killing people, Revelation Road 2 features Josh trying to hold back on his murderous instincts. Flashbacks to Hawg’s past life bring some much-needed nuance and context to his actions and they keep him from being just a one-dimensional villain. I would dare say that Bosworth actually gives a legitimately good performance in this film.

Though the film wears its influences on its sleeve (Hi, Mad Max!), Revelation Road 2 is still a surprisingly well-done action film.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

October Positivity: Revelation Road: The Beginning of the End (dir by Gabriel Sabloff)

Posted on October 26, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Eric Roberts is in the 2013 film, Revelation Road: The Beginning of the End.

Of course, he’s only in it for a few minutes. In fact, if you blink, you will miss him. He plays Sheriff Jenson, who is in charge of enforcing the law in a small desert community. He appears long enough to tell salesman John McManus (David A.R. White) not to leave town. McManus has just killed three armed men who were attempting to rob a general store. The store’s owner (Ray Wise) invites him to dinner but the cops are curious as to how a salesman could be so proficient at killing people.

Revelation Road plays out over the course of one long night. A group of bikers, led by the fearsome Hawg (Brian Bosworth), are seeking revenge for the death of their compatriots. Meanwhile, Iran is pushing the world towards war. In a motel, a woman asks John for money. Lighting flashes. Lights flicker on and off. The Earth shakes. It’s a fearful time, largely because the world itself is coming to an end. A little over an hour into this 88 minute film, there’s a sudden blinding light and suddenly, a fourth of the cast vanishes. One person who does not vanish runs into a kindly stranger, played by Bruce Marchiano. Marchiano will be well-known to viewers of faith-based cinema for the number of times that he’s played Jesus. So, you can probably guess what’s happened.

Revelation Road ends with the promise of a sequel, which means that the film also ends with a lot of unanswered questions. It makes Revelation Road difficult to really review because it’s obviously meant to be a prologue to the actual story. I will note that Revelation Road is a surprisingly violent movie, at least by the standards of most faith-based films. Then again, most of the violence was in self-defense and the Bible itself is full of stories of violent men who found redemption. In fact, you could probably argue that it’s impossible to do an apocalypse movie that isn’t violent. We’ll just have to wait to see where this story is heading.

I’ll review the sequel tomorrow.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

October Positivity: Me Again (dir by David A.R. White)

Posted on October 23, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2011’s Me Again, David A.R. White stars as Rich.

Rich is a typical David A.R. White character. He’s a preacher with a young family and he has lost his ability to excite his congregation. His sermons are dry and boring and show little connection with the concerns or lives of those listening. Rich is burned out and his wife, April (Ali Landry), is tired of listening to him complain. When they were children, April promised Rich that they were meant to be together. Now that they are adults and married, April and Rich are separated and April wants to make the divorce final.

Poor Rich! No one respects him and he’s about to lose his family. His one friend, Tony (Tommy Blaze), tries to offer some good advice but Rich doesn’t want to hear it. Rich just wants to feel sorry for himself and watch an odd infomercial hosted by Big Earl (Bruce McGill). Big Earl says that if you call his number, he can change your life. Rich doesn’t call the number but his life gets changed anyways.

Rich finds himself being transported from one body to another. When he wakes up, he’s a wealthy man who has no friends and who has a heart condition. Just as quickly, he finds himself in the body of Chloe (Andrea White Logan), an insecure super model with an eating disorder. Then, suddenly, he’s in the body of a fish floating in a fish tank in Tony’s restaurant. Then he’s his daughter’s teen boyfriend, who is pressuring her to start taking birth control. (AGCK!) Then he’s in his wife’s body. Briefly, he takes control of Della Reese. He even spends some time in jail, talking to Big Earl.

And I guess the idea is that, from going to body to body, Rich learns why he needs to stop feeling sorry for himself and actually make the effort to make his marriage work. He also comes to understand the problems of a few other people. The rich man needs to go to church. The model needs to do something about all the disparaging post-it notes that she has hanging around her house. Her daughter’s boyfriend needs to be handcuffed with a sock in his mouth. The fish need as new home. You get the idea.

This movie …. well, let’s give credit where credit is due. David A.R. White is not a bad actor and his comedic timing is adequate. There were a few moments when he did make me smile. I laughed out loud when he suddenly became a fish. As a director, though, White goes a bit overboard. The whole thing with Rich becoming a model starts out as relatively humorous but then it just goes on and on. As well, I appreciated the message of taking care of other people but I’m not sure that the best way to communicate that message was for the very white Rich to briefly inhabit the body of a black housekeeper. The intentions may have been good but the execution often left me cringing.

Me Again is like a lot of faith-based comedies. There are a few humorous moments but, in the end, it’s just too uneven to really work.

October Positivity: Meant To Be (dir by Bradley Dorsey)

Posted on October 20, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

2012’s Meant To Be tells the story of …. well, it tells a few stories.

Tori (Erin Sossamon) is a teenage girl who has a bright future but only if she can survive her less-than-wonderful present. She has an abusive boyfriend. Her parents seem to be absent. She’s a photographer and her high school counselor (Michael Gross) has helped her to find a scholarship but Tori has recently discovered that she’s pregnant!

Linda Dickson (Erika Eleniak) is a social worker, who lives in a nice house and who has a wonderful husband (Dean Cain) but who also seems to be struggling with an overwhelming depression. Maybe it’s because her 18 year-old daughter has recently left home for college. She obsesses on finding newspaper stories about 20 year-olds doing wonderful things. She cuts them out of the paper and puts them in a shoebox. (I do the same thing with well-written obituaries.) When a call comes in about a loud argument at Tori’s house, Linda is the one who investigates. When she realizes that Tori is pregnant, Linda becomes a part of Tori’s life, giving her advice. Linda is determined to convince Tori to not get an abortion, even if it means that Tori will lose her scholarship.

And finally, there’s Nathan (Bradley Dorsey), a twenty year-old aspiring writer who doesn’t know what he should write about. In a voice-over, he says that he’s learned that writing about only what you know can be a trap so he’s decided to write about what he doesn’t know. (By that logic, my next short story should be about trigonometry.) Nathan grew up in the foster system. He doesn’t know who his mother was. He’s not even fully sure where he was born. But he’s still going to search for her so he can discover not only where he came from but also why he was abandoned.

Nathan finds himself staying at a mysterious hotel, one where all of the other guests also appear to be people who never knew their mother. Even though Nathan puts a do-not disturb sign on his door, the motel maid (Della Reese) still regularly enters his room and encourages him to get out of bed and continue his search. With the help of two other guests, Shelly (Kristen Renton) and Becky (Colleen Foy), Nathan is able to track down his mother and her address….

Can you guess who she is?

Of course, you can! Now, in all fairness to the movie, it doesn’t present the fact that Linda is Nathan’s mother as some sort of surprise twist. From the moment that Nathan figures out that his mother was named Linda and then Becky comes across an old glamour shot of Erika Eleniak in a high school yearbook, it’s pretty clear that Linda Dickson gave up Nathan and she’s never stopped thinking about him and that’s why she’s so obsessed with Tori. That’s not the twist.

But there is a twist and here it is….

Are you ready?

Nathan and all the residents at the hotel and most of the passengers on the flights that Nathan takes in and out of town are …. ABORTION GHOSTS! That’s right. Linda had an abortion. Nathan was the son she was meant to have but didn’t.

Is it heavy-handed? Yes. Is it effective? Well, the answer to that question probably depends on how you feel about abortion. That’s one thing about all of these abortion movies. It’s hard for me to imagine that any of these films — whether it’s the church-produced Pro-Life films or the studio-produced Pro-Choice films — have ever changed anyone’s mind about abortion. As such, movies about abortion largely exist to preach to the choir. Abortion movies, regardless of which side they come down on, are largely movie that people watch so that they can nod and think to themselves, “My side really is the only correct one.”

As for the film itself, it’s rather slow and the voice-over tends to get rather portentous. Dean Cain was probably on the set for one day. Colleen Foy gave the best performance while Erika Eleniak was a bit bland in the lead role. On the plus side, it looked like a real movie, which is more than one can say for a lot of faith-based films. Again, how you react to the film will largely depend on whether or not you agree with its message.

October Positivity: Marriage Retreat (dir by David Christiaan)

Posted on October 10, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2011’s Marriage Retreat, Jeff Fahey and Victoria Jackson play marriage counselors.

Seriously, that’s bring to mind some wonderful images, doesn’t it? I would pay money for a film where Jeff Fahey plays a Dr. Phil-type psychiatrist who has his own television show where he yells at his guests and tell them that they’re not worth his time. Fahey would totally knock that role out of the park. As for Victoria Jackson, her eccentric screen persona would seem to make her the perfect companion for Fahey. Fahey is known for intensity. Jackson is known for being in her own private world. They’re a good combination!

And Fahey and Jackson are the best things about Marriage Retreat. Admittedly, Victoria Jackson doesn’t really get to do too much but she has a few good scenes with Fahey. Fahey, for his part, dominates the entire film. Marriage Retreat may be a lightweight and ultimately rather light-headed comedy but Fahey doesn’t give a lightweight performance. Fahey delivers all of his lines with that hard-driving intensity of his and, when someone complains about being married, Fahey’s glare tells you all you need to know. If the film’s message was that being a bad husband results in dealing with the wrath of Fahey, many husbands would immediately shape up.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film doesn’t really live up to the performances of either Fahey and Jackson. The majority of the film deals with three boring couples who all go on a marriage retreat. They stay at what appears to be a summer camp and they discuss why their marriages are falling apart.

For instance, Mark (David A.R. White) says that he’s not ready to be a father and he’s come up with all sorts of financial excuses to justify not starting a family. Do you think Jeff Fahey’s going to let him get away with that? No way! Plus, Mark’s wife (Andrea Logan White) is already pregnant so Mark better stop whining and step up.

Bobby Castle (Tommy Blaze) was a successful businessman but then he blew all of his money in some unwise investments. Now, Bobby is addicted to gambling online and his wife (Caroline Choi) is thinking of leaving him. Bobby is such a degenerate gambler (to quote Joe Pesci in Casino) that he even finds a way to get online at the camp so that he can continue to play poker on the Internet. The man needs help!

And finally, James Harlow (Matthew Florida) needs to grow up, especially since he’s about to become a father…. wait, a minute, I thought that was Mark’s problem. Well, no matter. Grow up, James!

The men are all immature and Jeff Fahey calls them out on it while Victoria Jackson tells the wives that they need to remember that God made them second and their job is to support their husbands …. wait, what? Oh, wait — this is another faith-based movie about marriage. The recurring theme in these films is that, no matter how much the husband screws up, it’s still ultimately the fault of the wife for not being understanding and supportive. Yeah, okay, then. There’s a difference between being supportive and being a doormat.

Anyway, the problem with this film is that I didn’t really care about the married couples. But I did enjoy watching Jeff Fahey do his thing.

October Positivity: The Wager (dir by Judson Pearce Morgan)

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2007’s The Wager, Randy Travis plays Michael Steele, an Oscar-nominated actor who….

Stop laughing, that’s not nice.

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that Randy Travis is not exactly the first person that I would cast as an Oscar-nominated actor. And, I’ll also be the first to admit that having Randy Travis act in this film makes it even harder to believe him as someone who could someday be nominated for an Oscar. A lot of country music stars have tried their hand at acting and most of them have been able to survive on the basis of their own authenticity. But there’s nothing authentic about Travis’s performance here. Even when he picks up a guitar and sings a song about the difficulties that he’s facing, he’s not convincing. In this, it’s not so much that Travis is a stiff actor as he just seems to evaporate whenever he’s on screen.

As for the film, Michael Steele is an actor who is known for his strong faith and his refusal to do sex scenes. When a director (Bronson Pinchot) throws a fit over Steele’s refusal to shoot once such scene, Steele says that he’ll do the scene but only if it’s followed by a scene in which his co-star has to deal with being a single mother. OUCH! Michael Steele seems like he’s fun at parties….

(Apparently, it doesn’t occur to Michael that his character could wear a condom.)

Wait a minute. This guy has the same name as that jackass who is always on the news talking about how he’s a Republican who thinks everyone should vote for the Democrats. I wonder if that’s intentional. Anyway….

Michael Steele’s career has had its up and downs. His recent divorce from Annie (Nancy Stafford) has damaged his family friendly image. But his Oscar nomination and the fact that he’s expected to win has once again made the world’s most popular star. But then — scandal! A tabloid photographer snaps a picture of Michael talking to a young actress at his house. In the background, a little kid watches. Now, the kid is a part of the Big Brother program and Michael was just trying to help the younger woman with her career but it doesn’t matter. Soon, Michael finds himself being portrayed as being some sort of pervert. When he punches a photographer, he finds himself getting arrested — RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIS CHURCH!

Now, as you may have guessed, this is yet another retelling of the story of Job, with Michael having his faith tested by one disaster after another. He doesn’t lose his faith and, as a result, he wins both an Oscar and he also becomes a hero when he rescues the kid from the Big Brother program from his abusive stepfather. Anyone who thinks that God wouldn’t have a hand in who wins an Oscar obviously did not listen to Will Smith’s acceptance speech.

The Wager is a film that would probably not be made today. Today, you’re not likely to see a socially conservative, faith-based film where a successful actor is wrongly accused of being a pervert. Then again, you also probably wouldn’t see a politically liberal film in which a successful white male actor was wrong accused of being an abuser, not in today’s cultural climate. On both the Left and the Right, attitudes towards Hollywood have changed. Beyond the film’s political and cultural subtext, its portrait of the Oscars as being the most important event of the year also feels rather old-fashioned. I imagine it felt old-fashioned in 2007 as well….

Then again, this is a film in which Randy Travis plays the best actor of his generation so perhaps it’s best not to take any of it too seriously. The miscasting of Travis pretty much sabotages the movie from the start but, on the positive side, Bronon Pinchot is amusing as a bitchy director and Jude Ciccolella has a few good scenes as Michael’s supportive agent. Give those men an Oscar!