Another Review, It's True

On this New Year's Day of 2013, I can think of nothing more inappropriate to talk about than the old movie I watched last Friday, but that's just what's going to happen. You can probably expect a New Year's item in some months, or never. Being timely is something I have never done so well. What I write may not be popular now or ever, but it will at least hold up. Anyway, with this evening's plans taking shape and creeping up, I'm seizing on this movie idea.

Entitled "Rockwell", the box described it as a basic story of retribution exacted by a man whose friends were set upon by some bad guys. It was an obscure film recommended by solely one fact: billed second to a man called Randy Gleave was none other than longtime Utah Jazz standout Karl Malone. While examining the box in the store, I couldn't guess why he would be in it. I presumed the film to be some kind of vanity project.

Watching the film produced some illumination. Unmentioned by the box was that this story was about the Mormons and their flight from persecution before settling in Utah. Unexplained by the box or the story was why an African-American fellow like Malone would be among the Mormons, but I confess to not being a student of their history. Certainly the film did little to enlighten me beyond what I already knew. In any event, Malone proved to be a minor supporting character at best.

The character of Rockwell (played by Gleave) was a notorious figure of the west, and evidently was a bodyguard to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. In the film, he fends off attacks by nefarious characters from Illinois, appears in some kind of community play and receives wildly inappropriate overtures from multiple prepubescent girls. I truly don't know how to explain how a man who calls to mind nobody more so than Grizzly Adams would do the second of those three things, let alone the repulsive third.

Of course, were it not for that, the film would still be hard to watch. Virtually none of the characters in the film seem to have had their own voices survive to appear in the film. Everyone sounds dubbed with the same low, flat voice. The poor sound and picture were a real blessing in the end though, because I didn't really want to see or hear anything anyway. Well, sometimes you find a diamond in the rough, but this one was just rough. I don't recommend it.