Minneapolis thriller gets ND premiere

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Movies Editor

This Friday, July 8th, begins a local one-week run of a new Minneapolis-made independent feature, but not at the Fargo Theatre as one might expect. Shot in 720p HD video with a Panasonic HVX200 and blown up to 35mm film, it will be playing at the West Acres Cinema in Fargo, as well as the Carmike 8 in Bismarck, as the first stops on a very limited market-by-market release around the country throughout the summer. Although originally titled “Man Made,” this low-budget sci-fi apocalyptic thriller that’s been compared to “Rosemary’s Baby” is being distributed under the more intriguing and controversial title, “I’m Not Jesus, Mommy.”

The film was written and directed by Vaughn Juares with an interesting sort of a modern “Frankenstein”/“Twilight Zone” feeling, building gradually to its big revelations with some clever inversions of expectations along the way (such as Americans fleeing to Mexico illegally in the wake of national disasters). Unfortunately the advertising campaign and even the release title tend to dilute the impact of one of the story’s biggest twists, which is carefully hidden during the actual film until much later in the plot.

The plot in brief deals with Dr. Kimberly Gabriel (Bridget McGrath, who also produced the film), a renowned female Ob/Gyn who is unable to have children herself but longs to be a mother. While working on a top-secret cloning experiment, she decides to implant one of the surplus embryos destined for disposal into herself and turns out to be the only mother to give birth to a healthy baby. Seven years later, the world is on the brink of destruction from global natural disasters, especially in the United States, and her young son David (Rocko Hale) is starting to exhibit mysterious tendencies and an odd personality.

A few scenes drag on uncomfortably long, mainly those between cloning scientist Dr. Roger Gibson (Charles Hubbell) with his sister and niece (Debbie DiLisi and little Aja Hale, respectively). It would have helped clarify things if a brief scene or two had set up both Gibson’s relationship with his sister and his abrupt personality shift from dangerous ruthless scientist to even more dangerous born-again fanatic after the disasters start. The ending somewhat ambiguously implies more than it actually reveals and can easily be open to misinterpretation.

The acting performances are good all around. Co-writer and co-producer Joe Schneider also shows up in the first half of the film as Kimberly’s husband. The production values for the sets and costumes always seem appropriate (the low budget giving a gritty naturalism that’s lacking in so many Hollywood apocalyptic sci-fi films), and the cinematography and editing (both also done by Juares) are effective.

Fans of indie films and off-beat science fiction that doesn’t try to spell everything out for the viewer should find such to like about “I’m Not Jesus Mommy.”

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