1/10

Old Fashioned is possibly the toughest religion based film i have sat through. It’s not the worst film of that genre, but more on the fact that it is pointless that it has anything to do with religion, and that it’s existence baffles me as i search for clarity in a nearly two hour entertainment drought that took many pauses throughout my viewing experience. The film focuses on Clay Walsh (Rik Swartzwelder), a former frat boy who gives up his sexually ambitious lifestyle and now runs an antique shop in a small Midwestern college town. There, he has become notorious for his lofty and outdated theories on love and romance. When Amber Hewson (Elizabeth Robertson), a free-spirited young woman with a restless soul, drifts into the area and rents the apartment above his shop, she finds herself surprisingly drawn to his noble ideas, which are new and intriguing to her. And Clay, though he tries to fight and deny it, simply cannot resist being attracted to her spontaneous and passionate embrace of life. If you can’t tell by my rating, i absolutely loathed this film. First of all, the characters are unlikable and not even in an entertaining sense. Even more so than Christian Grey in “Fifty Shades of Grey”, Clay is a controlling and at times scary human being. There are so many warning signs for Amber with her interest in this man. Their interest in one another doesn’t make sense from Amber’s point of view because as the film goes on we find out she has a yearning for sexual touch. So she decides to get involved with the man who has sworn abstinence until his wedding night? Make no mistake about it, if abstinence is your thing, then rock on. But the problem with the believability and lack of chemistry with our two main protagonists is that they never kiss, cuddle, and barely hold hands. It’s nice that Director/Star/Writer Rik Swartzwelder was kind enough to cast himself in a role and think he could get away without forming any kind of bond between these two characters. I don’t buy that these two have any interest in each other for a second, and it’s made all the more ridiculous when after one date they seriously consider a marriage talk. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I hope no influential minds end up seeing this film. The last thing the world needs is people like this walking around. I Mentioned earlier that the religious aspect of the film is pointless, and that is because there is really no need for it in this particular storyline. Clay isn’t living with sex because of religious beliefs, he is doing it because he thinks this helps make him a better person from the terrible things he used to do to women. This is where the story at the very least made me laugh. It turns out Clay, the sap who couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag, is a former director of Girls Gone Wild DVD’s. This is an actual storyline that Swartzwelder thought would represent his evil past ways?? Is is a slimeball way to make money? Yes, but it doesn’t cast him in the near vilainous light that Clay hates himself for. The fact that the movie makes this out to be the worst thing possible shows just how tame and vanilla this film is. The camera work is subpar even for a low budget religious film. There are many shots that take place a little too up close to the face of our characters during conversations. The camera was so close at times that i thought someone would slip and actually look at the camera. Why not? There were many times when i saw Clay about to break into laughter midway through a line read. I’m glad someone got entertainment out of this morbid waste of film. Another thing wrong with the production is the choppy style of the editing. Scenes feel like they end when a next shot of something completely unrelated shows and then we go back to the original scene. Sometimes it cuts and never goes back to finishing the conversation. It makes it very hard to keep up with ongoing situations in the film. Our characters boring story goes nowhere fast, so they have to shoehorn some suspense in the final twenty minutes of the film by introducing us to characters we haven’t seen, but are now showing up on Amber and Clay’s doorsteps to try to seduce them into cheating on the other one. Where did this come from? It doesn’t matter because it’s soon dismissed in favor of an ending that doesn’t make us or the characters feel any closer to the reality of what is going on. Old Fashioned is a film that many of my readers have waited months for me to review, and it didn’t disappoint. It’s bad from it’s slow narrative start, to the conclusion that gives us no satisfaction for where these two are heading. This is a relationship doomed to fail, and i for one wish i got that movie instead. Old Fashioned is an insult to romance both past and present. Many of the older crowds who see this film will be humiliated into admitting that they have more in common with today’s youth in terms of romantic offerings than they do this film and it’s slap in the face title. Too tone deaf to ever be taken seriously, but not entertaining enough to ever include in a bad movie night marathon.