Blu-ray Review: Sedona (2011)

Have you ever found yourself in a place you simply do not want to be in or at — overcome with the feeling that you had been somehow drawn in there by an unseen, unknown force? It tends to happen all too frequently in semi-spiritual movies like the 2011 Indie flick Sedona; while it happens ever more regularly to me — as I seem to get stuck with watching movies like Sedona more often than I would really like to. The movie — the second feature from writer/director/producer/editor Tommy Stovall — delivers the two separate plights of several individuals visiting Sedona, Arizona.

For Tammy (Frances Fisher), she seems to have been pulled in by something greater than her own high-powered businessperson ego — and finds herself stuck in town after a small airplane is forced to make a landing on the road, which lands her car in the local slow-moving mechanic's shop. For Scott and Eddie (Seth Peterson and Matthew J. Williamson, respectively), a simple visit to the beautiful rocky terrain the weird, mystical location has to offer with their two children in tow results in a lost kid and two very frantic parents. Alas, Sedona is a very vortex-y place, with many of the strange happenings and equally peculiar people having been put there to serve some sort of purpose in these people's lives.

For me, they were all put there to bore the living shit out of me.

Beth Grant, Christopher Atkins, Lin Shaye, Barry Corbin, and the previously reclusive Robert Shields turn in bit performances in this, the amateur auteur Stovall's second attempt at filmmaking. It's a slow-moving, spacey one (his first being a film called Hate Crime — something I feel like committing against Mr. Stovall after watching this). Between the film's incessant overly-mystical soundtrack (which succeeds in making the viewer want to drift away into a coma just to get away from it if nothing else), paint-by-numbers story, somewhat poor direction of its league of not-all-entirely-professional performers, and what are quite possibly the worst special effects I have ever seen in a motion picture to date, Sedona seems like it's nothing more than a giant waste of time.

Article Author: Luigi Bastardo

Luigi Bastardo is the disgruntled alter-ego of Adam Becvar, a thirtysomething lad from Northern California who has watched so many weird movies since the tender age of 3 that a conventional life is out of the question. …

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