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Sadly Over-hyped

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The review by Richard Fuller1 is strangely detailed with names and actions, but the actions do not reflect anything from this film that he pans, and excuses himself for being 8 years old when he saw it. For example, he mentions drug use, but Ellen didnt use drugs. It was her friends who tempted her to do drugs. Read the review by nihilistwonder if you want to know about this film. Forget richard.fuller1's comment and poor rating. This was a worthy film, in its time. Somebody should start showing it again on one of these tv movie channels.What the world needs now, is de-programmers, sweet deprogrammers. but not bullies, just real deprogrammers to re-educate the masses and help people think straight, to uncover the hypocrisy and fraud purporting itself to be the truth... but even if such people existed, who would listen? it would be boring, of course, as we have a tendency to love dreams more than realities. Thus the maxim: a sucker is born every minute, or something like that.

I only saw this once also in my early teens, but it never left me, because Michael Parks was good and creepy as the "Messiah" of his little cult. Really, kind of a precursor to the real-life Jim Jones situation. One could see exactly how someone who knew better might fall into his clutches--- he's nice and supportive one minute, seductive the next (very edgy for a network made-for-prime-time-TV in those days!) The other other controversial part was Ellen's family's employment of a deprogrammer (based on a real one), as they were called, to basically pull a reverse brainwashing that didn't look nearly as enjoyable as the Michael Parks character's brand of conversion. In real life, there were lawsuits and questions of First Amendment and Freedom of Religion rights involved. Nowadays, the "cults" seem far more sinister, with their full potential for destruction revealed by Jonestown and others, and the current accusations of abuses by Scientology, etc. However, deprogrammers, for what they were worth, seem to have gone by the wayside long since, as far as "rescuing" and "curing" cultists go. Seems like their methods were co-opted by those Scientologists! I would love to see this old movie again, to discover whether it's still as good as I remember.