MicroCinema Scene

Sheer pretension, The Votive Pit be thy name. For this website, I try my hardest to find the good in microcinema films. No matter how much I personally dislike a film, I try to find something supportive to say about it. I know what it’s like to put your heart and soul into a project and how much work goes into it. It takes every part of you.

But if a project is so utterly horrible, does that excuse it? Should the fact it’s a no-budget film give it an automatic write-off? No. You don’t send your film to a review site unless you want an honest review. And if I’m being honest, The Votive Pit pretty much sums up everything that is wrong about indie-film today: it looks good, but at the cost of the screenplay, resulting in an embarrassing fiasco of laughable dialog, ridiculous situations and liberalized self-importance, all under the façade of faux-depth.

Set in the “explosive” world of a public junior high, we’re introduced to a variety of annoyingly quirky teachers, all with psychoses that endear them to no one—the crazed science teacher who carries a doorknob around (I guess it symbolizes something), the two old bitch teachers who constantly complain about everything (one of whom has a clichéd hacking cough), the radical history professor—wasn’t this all essayed in the lamentable Nick Nolte film Teachers over twenty years ago? Was that not the final word?

And as if these stock, drama club characters weren’t bad enough, the film is filled with laughable dream sequences, a constant voiceover saying “Don’t go ‘round hungry” and the threat of kids going berserk in the classroom—it’s like it was written by a tenth grader who thinks he’s deeper than he really is. It’s so damn pretentious that at times, you feel like it’s gotta be a joke. It has to be a goof–the whole thing reeks of bad drama club.

And no wonder, it’s based on a stage play. This is the reason why I avoid live theater at all costs. And this is the reason why I’m saying avoid The Votive Pit at all costs.

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