{"id":5360,"date":"2009-04-03T17:23:02","date_gmt":"2009-04-03T22:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/?p=5360"},"modified":"2016-01-09T18:49:01","modified_gmt":"2016-01-09T23:49:01","slug":"review-gods-forgotten-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/2009\/04\/03\/review-gods-forgotten-town\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: GOD’S FORGOTTEN TOWN"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"GodsForgottenTownPoster\"<\/a>Why should I be upset over a minor horror film that falls apart at the end? A fair question, but let me explain why God\u2019s Forgotten Town<\/strong> was disappointing and ultimately an insult to my humanity.<\/p>\n

After the credits, Syra (Marina Gatell) and Roberto (Armando del Rio) a writer and photographer for a Spanish magazine covering the paranormal, visit the high-rise apartment of a very distraught woman and her disturbed daughter (it is the daughters drawings we have seen in the title sequence). This woman is being driven insane by voices that only she seems to hear. Sensing there is no \u201cparanormal\u201d angle here, Syra helpfully offers her the name of a good psychologist and the woman gets angry and demands that Syra and Roberto leave. Apparently, Syra and Roberto are not big believers in the paranormal and they are both doing this because it is a paying job until something better comes along. Then, out in the hallway, Syra begins to hear a conglomeration of bizarre sounds and voices just like the woman described so she races back into the apartment just in time to see the woman sitting on the balcony railing with her screaming daughter; but before Syra can do anything, the woman jumps off the balcony with her daughter, both falling to a horrible death.<\/p>\n

This got my attention!<\/p>\n

This event really affects Syra and it is some time before she feels well enough to go out on another assignment. This time, Syra and Roberto, are paired with a video camera operator named Julia (Sonia Lazaro) and a soundman named Ruben (Miguel Angel Munoz). They are sent out to investigate a 60 year old mystery regarding the complete disappearance of the inhabitants of a small Spanish town called Manases after a Nazi airplane crashed nearby in 1945. But Syra has changed, she now thinks if she had only believed the woman when she was talking about voices and spirits, perhaps the woman would not have jumped. This means that Syra is now in a frame of mind to believe that every stray breeze or bump in the night is a real paranormal experience. Sure enough, when this Spanish road company of The Blair Witch Project<\/strong> arrives in Manases, all kinds of strange things happen and it\u2019s just one clich\u00e9 after another.<\/p>\n

We have quick cuts to frightening images combined with loud bangs on the soundtrack to jolt us, their car, which has functioned perfectly up till now, suddenly dies and when the group tries to leave on foot, Syra twists her ankle and can\u2019t go on any further. Julia and Ruben decide to walk back to the nearby town, but instead of walking along the safe highway, they decide (as only people in horror movies ever do), that walking through the dark mysterious forest is the best way to go. At one point, an exasperated Syra says to the still skeptical Roberto, \u201cI don\u2019t see why it\u2019s so difficult for you to accept all this\u201d referring to the paranormal events.<\/p>\n

Well, let me answer for him.<\/p>\n

How about this, before he gives up on every bit of scientific evidence, every piece of intelligently understood knowledge and well considered theories about the physical world which have been tested time and again over the millennia, he\u2019s going to need a bit more evidence than some dopey woman\u2019s \u201cintuition\u201d or the \u201cgut feelings\u201d of a camera operator who is always smoking a joint. In one sequence, the spirits gather up a variety of crockery and telekinetically smash it against the walls of a house. Everybody witnesses this and I suppose it means the spirits just want to communicate something.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s my question, if the spirits have the ability to throw pottery all around the room, why don\u2019t they have the ability to pick up a pencil and just write a nice note explaining what they want? Does becoming a spirit only effect your penmanship, but not your throwing arm?<\/p>\n

\"GodsForgottenTown2\"<\/a>Unsurprisingly, the whole mishegas of this film is related to the Nazi plane that crashed nearby in 1945 while en route to Berlin. Apparently, the plane had been carrying some kind of \u201cscepter of power\u201d (whatever that is), which would have enabled the Nazi\u2019s to win WWII. But the plane crashed and the power scepter never reached Hitler, so the surviving Nazi officer tried to use the power scepter himself and apparently in order to do this, he had to have all the inhabitants of Manases killed, seemingly for no reason. I don\u2019t want to defend the Nazis, but even they didn\u2019t go in for wanton killing.\u00a0 In fact, what made the Nazis so chilling was they were quite clear about their reasons for killing, no matter what we may think of them now.<\/p>\n

In fact, this is the point in the film where I got insulted.\u00a0 The Nazis were one of the cruelest, most dangerous threats to civilization ever to challenge us and they ran roughshod over most of Europe for well over a decade. Because of the Nazis, the world was plunged into one of the worst wars ever fought.\u00a0 Millions upon millions of people were killed fighting their incredible war machine. The Nazis were also responsible for one of the most vicious and nearly successful attempts at genocide in the entirety of human history.<\/p>\n

It took a worldwide effort to defeat them. From Stalingrad to D-Day and beyond, the Nazis lost because of brave, dedicated and above all ordinary men and women who did not want the world to run according to the visions of Hitler, were willing to lay down their lives for that cause. And now this dinky little piece of horror trash from Spain tries to sell us the idea that none of that other stuff mattered and that all the Nazis needed to win was some dumb scepter of power from South America?<\/p>\n

This film is a turkey.\u00a0 Please avoid it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why should I be upset over a minor horror film that falls apart at the end? A fair question, but let me explain why God\u2019s Forgotten Town was disappointing and ultimately an insult to my [click for more]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":5361,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[1989,68],"series":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5360","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-review","8":"tag-gods-forgotten-town","9":"tag-philadelphia-film-festival"},"aioseo_notices":[],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":false,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5360\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5360"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=5360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}