Simon Dillon
2 min readJan 13, 2022

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I've not seen Karol, so must catch up with that at some point. Your other choices are good.

I'm fairly well versed on the evangelical film subculture, and they are 99 percent dreadful. I can only ever remember enjoying a small handful. I quite liked The Cross and the Switchblade (though honestly, the book Run Baby Run, which tells the same story from gang member Nicky Cruz's perspective, is more compelling) and there's a Billy Graham funded film of The Hiding Place, about Corrie Ten Boom, which is a passable stab at adapting the (much better) book.

On the more eccentric end of things, I did enjoy an absurd pseudo-Hitchcockian psycho-thriller called Dangerous Calling, about a pastor who falls foul of an unbalanced church member. Also there's a film Kevin Max made called The Imposter (not to be confused with the excellent 2012 documentary The Imposter) which isn't entirely terrible.

Outside of that, the evangelical funded films are fairly ghastly bunch, including umpteen End Times themed pieces such as Left Behind, or further back, the Russ Doughton produced monstrosities Thief in the Night, A Distant Thunder, Image of the Beast, and The Prodigal Planet. The Billy Graham ones are fairly rubbish too, as the plot is always the same - hopeless sinner sinks deeper into drugs, etc, before getting saved at a Billy Graham rally.

There are a couple of other notable evangelical subgenres, including the burn-the-heretic series taking a very one-sided view of the Reformation and telling the stories of John Huss, Wycliffe, etc (mostly rubbish). Oh, and there are amusingly dreadful horny-teenager-gets-pregnant-and-secretly-has-an-abortion cautionary tales too.

I've also just recalled a monumentally terrible film version of Pilgrim's Progress which somehow managed to rope in an early-in-his-career Liam Neeson.

Your article has prompted me to dig out and revise a piece I wrote on what I consider good Christian films - which include the likes of Of Gods and Men, which you mentioned here too. Expect to see it in the next week or so.

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Simon Dillon
Simon Dillon

Written by Simon Dillon

Novelist and Short Story-ist. Film and Book Lover. If you cut me, I bleed celluloid and paper pulp. Blog: www.simondillonbooks.wordpress.com

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