Missionary

source: Missionary

Katherine (Dawn Olivieri) is a struggling mom with a 12 year old son Kelsey (Connor Christie). She is separated from her cheating husband Ian (Kip Pardue) who is attempting to get back into her good graces. Meanwhile, she is visited by some Latter Day Saints missionaries, one of whom she starts seeing romantically. Kevin (Mitch Ryan) is ten years younger than her and has difficulty adjusting his master cosmic plans when Ian comes back into the picture and he is left out. This is your typical jilted lover/stalker film except it is a Mormon in the bad guy role. Nice little twist, but the film is nothing extraordinary. Parental Guide: F-bomb, sex, nudity (Dawn Olivieri

We have all seen Mormon missionaries spreading the word in their black pants and white shirt and tie. This movie starts off like a Lifetime thriller but ends up more in the horror genre. The heroine is estranged from her cheating hubby. She sleeps with a younger Mormon missionary who helps her kid with football. Turns out the clean cut innocent looking young man is a maniac who becomes obsessed with her when she decides to go back to her husband. The actress Dawn Olivieri seems a bit expressionless in her acting. The missionary played by Mitch Ryan is quite effective. It doesn't demonize the religion but it shows there can be wackos anywhere - don't let appearances fool you. Worth a watch.

Well, this is decent thriller and jumpy at some parts, but I heard things about things happening on missions with missionaries on the mission I went to. Santa Rosa, California, around 1992 to 1994, is when I went on mine. There was a women I was tempted to do the same thing with. I am not like this guy in the movie. She was hot, and luckily, I had a companion that got me not to do it. My last area of the mission too. So I would of been like this except I did not think of having a family with her and sealed. I am still going to church, and never done anything like this in the movie. This movie is great, and I am into horror movies and some thrillers. I always wanted to see this movie, and watched it on Netflix. I am glad I did and enjoyed it. It only deserves a 5 though. So it is not fabulous but good. I would watch it again but just to watch if there is nothing else to watch and be okay with it.

The characters all behave so realistically that I was sucked in and on the edge of my seat. A lot of times things happen in this kind of movie that cause it to lose that realism. That did not happen here. The story of a good mother that is going through a tough time and makes an understandably bad decision because of it. She never lost credibility to me. The kid in the movie is not some super child or genius or crazy person. He behaves like a real kid his age and the villain of the piece was frightening and crazy but not unrealistically tough or invincible. It made this movie uniquely scary. I was in the mood for a thriller. I got it.

This is the typical B grade stalker movie. There is nothing is new here, it's very predictable, and the acting is mediocre at best. This was recommended to me by a friend, and I watched it on Netflix. I should have looked at the viewer rating first, because if I'd seen it I wouldn't have bothered to watch. I won't make that mistake again any time soon! I suppose I'm not the right audience for this movie. I do like psychological thrillers, but stories about psychos who just go all psychotic with no rhyme or reason just bore me. I'm not a prude about sex or violence, but here are parts of this that just seem to be gratuitous: over-the-top violence just thrown in for effect. When I think about it, I can't imagine a single friend to whom I'd recommend this (except perhaps the one who recommended it to me). As they say, now THERE'S two hours of my life that I won't get back...

Katherine is a struggling mother trying to create a better life for her and her son. She meets Elder Brock, a handsome Mormon missionary with a troubled past and they begin an incendiary love affair. Some might look at this and say it is disrespectful to the Mormon religion and its followers. Those people would be wrong. This is not in any way saying that Mormons are evil, but that a twisted person will use their faith in twisted ways. For me, this was very much in the same spirit as "The Stepfather" with Terry O'Quinn. Stepfathers are not bad, but they can be! The tone was just right, the tension was good. There was some dichotomy between what makes a family for one person versus another. This certainly deserves another watch and I would recommend it to others.

This would never have escalated to the degree it did while he was still a missionary. Mormon missionaries are never allowed to be alone by themselves. There are also strict rules and protocols that prohibit male missionaries from teaching and interacting with single adults of the opposite sex. This single Mom would have been handed over to the girl missionaries in the area. And these days there are always at least four missionaries in an area who are watching each other's every move. It is always four to six elders in one apartment and pair of girl missionaries in their own apartment close by. So his sneaking out would be quite the feat to pull off. And the heart attack thing, even if the paramedics would not have allowed him to travel with them (which is extremely rare), he would not be allowed to walk back home. He would have had to find a phone and immediately call his companion or the other elders in his city or zone right there on the spot. Which would NEVER be done in a business district part of town (they only proselytize in residential areas). In this day and age with everyone having a cell phone, it would not have been a hard task to do. Also, when he was pretending to be sick, his companion would not have been allowed to leave. He would have had to stay there and miss the game. There would never be an exception or a choice in that. And the sneaking out thing is a huge "no no" and can get you sent home because it is against the rules. Whenever someone is caught doing such a thing, their companion or other missionaries in the area would have reported it to the missionary leader and the Elder would have been sent home immediately, especially if sex was involved. There would be no wait time, he'd have his bags packed and escorted onto a plane home within the hour for doing that. There is no second chance for that kind of offense. His mission would have ended right then and there.

"Missionary" revolves around conflicts that appear beneath seemingly friendly and interesting relationships, only that nothing is what is seems on surface. I'm usually willing to give latitude to smaller productions that feature a B-level cast, and that was the attitude I had when I saw the movie. The results were mixed. There is some decent acting on this movie, and when they have good text they can put some above average character performance. The major problem of this film is that writing is very inconsistent. The story oscillates between some good and believable scenes, with others that let you down by their incoherence, lack of continuity or just plain 'straight from cliché handbook'. A couple passages are extremely lame, almost giving the impression two separate writes at odds with each other developed the story. At the end of the movie, when closing credits come, there is this feeling that the director wasted an overachieving cast (relatively to their league) with bad text.

Since he made his writing and directing debut with "Dread", a nasty little adaptation of a Clive Barker piece, five years ago, Anthony DiBlasi has dipped his toes into a number of horror bloodbaths in varying genres. "Missionary" seems almost like a response to a dare from a drinking buddy: "Make a low-budget homage to Fatal Attraction and make the stalker a fanatical Mormon elder." And I'll be damned if the guy hasn't pulled it off. I do kind of question the taste of using ANY religion so prominently in such a movie. If you can get by that detail (and maybe DiBlasi chose Mormonism precisely because it would be so uncharacteristic to expect anything like this from an LDS elder), the film is relentless in building a pretty unbearable level of suspense over it's short run time. Credit not only DiBlasi's (as usual) driving pacing and crack storytelling but his cast as well --- they supply the glue that keeps your interest in this shop-worn plot. Dawn Olivieri anchors the film firmly as no-nonsense mom Katherine, who finds herself sucked into an affair with Elder Kevin Brock (an earnestly frightening Mitch Ryan), during a trial separation from husband Ian (Kip Pardue). None of the actors have any false-sounding dialog and the exchanges between Katherine and her son Kelsey (an impressive Connor Christie) ring especially sincere. "Missionary" is really pretty astonishing if you think about it. It's proof that you don't really need an original idea to make an absorbing film --- as long as you have a talented cast and writer/director at the helm to both keep you engaged and caring about the action on the screen.