laughingwarlock This movie sucks.I know how much work goes into a production like this and I feel for Mike and everything he did with this movie, but it's quality is shoddy as hell. And I don't mean the camera and stuff like that. I LOVED clerks and that was shot with the same thing.First of all, you can't tell when the protagonist is hallucinating and when he's not. The Cinematography doesn't carry those scenes. Now, this could be interesting if the plot was cohesive, but that doesn't happen either. A combination of poor dialogue, awkward transitions, and poor pacing stop that.Honestly, this movie is just one giant manifestation of how Mark is in denial about his alcoholism.But god bless him for making it.

jfgibson73 This black and white horror movie is a short film about an addict trying to get help. He joins a support group, and strange things start to happen. When the movie ends, we're still not totally clear what's been going on.A lot of the outdoor scenery looked really good. The black and white film gave this movie some great atmosphere. However, there really weren't very many memorable parts. The support group seems to be evil, coming after the addict several times and terrorizing him. They drag him through mud and beat on his car, but we aren't really sure if it happened or if he is just messed up.At the end, there is still some question about whether or not the group was actually evil. Because this movie interested me enough to learn more, I am going to seek out the documentary film showing how this was made. Hopefully, I will appreciate it more.

OldAle1 I first saw "Coven", the actual short film that is the subject of the documentary "American Movie" years ago, probably in a different cut, when or just after the documentary premiered in Chicago in 1999; this review is from the DVD release along with the documentary. I'd almost completely forgotten it, not because it's terrible or anything, but because it's so mediocre. It's obviously heartfelt, and it's really not a horror film despite the marketing - or if it is, it's more of a psychological horror film, with only a little bit of real violence at the end. Mark plays...Mark, a drug addict and alcoholic who wants to turn his life around, and gets involved in a 12-step type group that is obviously Christian in some ways (crosses all over) but also seems to be a cult. Or is it? Is Mark hallucinating the strange things that happen to him at the group meetings, and the "coven" (rhymes with "woven" of course) that at one point drags him through the mud in the woods, at another surrounds his car and beats on it with pipes. There's some interesting material here about addiction and delusion, but it's generally poorly acted and the lighting in the indoor scenes is such that things are often very indistinct, dark and ugly. Some of the outdoor sequences, the landscapes in particular, are rather beautiful. Shot on pretty grainy black and white 16mm.

SERVOMOORE The black&white cinematography is very uneven, some shots almost impossible to make out, others kind of beautiful in a dream-like way.The actors are a bit campy in large part, some are flat-out wooden, and look, we have an obsessed drug abuser who is trying to stay non-mainstream at the heart of the story. But not only that, we have religion playing a large role (although its pretty warped religion)In short, this film is basically PI about writing instead of math, but its budget is so much smaller it has the expected lesser amount of style or graphics. Personally, I like this film, and would even if I hadn't seen Chris Smith's documentary. Recommended viewing if you are hoping to be an artistic filmmaker.