The Antisocial Socialist

Soooo…which one of you is the vampire and which one is the werewolf?

The love triangle springs Eric, but in the most noisy way possible, which wakes up the militia men. One of them tells Damon and says “if anyone finds out what we’ve been doing, it’ll be bad.” Um…what have they been doing? Besides growing three plants and forming a cult, which last I heard isn’t illegal. I guess the presence of a children’s picture book in a compound where there are no children of picture-book-reading age visible hints as some future malfeasance, but you can’t arrest people for future crimes (yet). Anyway, the militia guy isn’t really down with killing Eric or anyone else but Damon says it’s necessary.

Eric wants to get the kids away and somewhere safe, which they probably would have been if they’d stayed in the city (at least up until Nicolae bombs it in two years, but it’s not like little Claire is going to live long enough to be of legal drinking age as it is). Gabby brings up Eric’s fellow prisoners and Eric says he’ll rescue them once the kids are away.

Eric and Gabby have a heart-to-heart while the boys wander around in the background. The blocking in this film is really bizarre. He apologizes for being a deadbeat dad but he’s found Jesus now. He talks about it in the most vague, anodyne terms that I think would probably be useless to anyone who wasn’t already a Christian. In an attempt to appeal to their presumed teenage atheist demographic, Eric says “it’s not about religion, it’s about what I’ve seen.” Which. Look, in this canon, if you convert to the wrong kind of Christianity, let alone any other religion, you are condemned to Hell for all eternity. So I think it is actually specifically about religion.

Damon, realizing that Sarah is the traitor, slaps her and then locks her in her bedroom. Sarah is an idiot. Obviously he was going to find out, so why go back and sleep in the bedroom that only locks from the outside?

The militia guy shoots Eric and Eric manages to wrestle him to death somehow before dying himself. He has the chillest ever death scene where he tells Gabby that it’s fine because he’s going to Heaven. He spends his last breaths trying to get Gabby and Claire to convert, which is hella manipulative. The girls cry for a bit, but really aren’t any more upset about Eric’s death than their mom’s. Anyway, Gabby says she has to go back for the other prisoners, so she leaves her injured little sister in the woods and tells her to walk for the road if she and the boys don’t come back.

Then we get a rescue sequence. It’s absolutely preposterous but it’s another example of why this is the least-bad Left Behind movie. All of the other prisoners are NPCs who haven’t gotten a single line, let alone a name, but our teenage protagonists refuse to leave them to face an uncertain fate with Damon. Compared to Rayford and Buck, who get in the way of emergency services and complain about all of the dead and dying people who are lying on the ground screaming between them and their destination—or who later assist Nicolae in nuking multiple urban centres—these kids are all decent people who deserve to go to Heaven if they truly want to hang out with a genocidal deity for eternity. Also Flynn was smart enough to take the militia man’s rifle.

I am extremely confused by the layout of this prison, though it’s not the most perplexing building (just wait). Flynn improbably picks the lock with the wrong bit of a paperclip, while Gabby gets the people in the house and Josh does an arson to distract the cultists. The second militia guy catches Flynn but Flynn talks him out of shooting them via extremely bad dialogue and escapes with two prisoners. Gabby gets Rachel, Sarah, and the others. Weirdly, very few of the cultists actually want to be there and they are mostly unarmed, which means they could have probably just overpowered Damon, taken the guns, and stayed on the farm.

The climax is a baffling, dimly lit escape sequence. First, Flynn and the two prisoners reach Claire in the woods. Then everyone else escapes in a truck with 15-year-old Josh driving, rather than any of the adults. Damon gives chase in a second truck.

Wait, so whose truck is the first truck? Also, wouldn’t there be tons of vehicles? This is a rural area; the kids walked, but the other cultists would have driven there.

Josh and Gabby get out of the truck and Sarah takes over driving to an abandoned farm at the end of the road. You guys are going to love the farm. It’s a Backrooms, Escher-level mindfuck architecturally. They run to find Claire and Flynn. Damon turns into a cheap Terminator knockoff and goes after the kids on foot rather than continue chasing the cultists in the truck. It turns into daylight randomly. Damon pops up in the field and shoots at them; the two prisoners go one way, the kids go the other way. For a prepper, Damon has a terrible aim.

The time of day changes again and you guys. You guys. Wait until you see what this abandoned farm looks like.

Exterior.

Other exterior, inside the first interior.

Interior (definitely part of the same building).

It was morning one minute ago.

Rather than quietly pursue them, Damon crunches around a lot on the gravel and shouts at the kids. They’ve left footprints, though, so he finds them pretty easily.

The storage room they were in turns out to have a second exit into another part of the building. How big is this building? The layout is so confusing. Also Damon fires a shot into the floor and it explodes for no apparent reason.

It’s afternoon again and the abandoned farm has part of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

They find yet another storage room but Flynn’s foot goes through the floorboard. He’s all “go without me” (go where? Unless this storage room also has a second exit?) but Josh won’t leave without him, and thus our teenage love triangle is no longer a V.

Damon breaks in, wastes still more ammunition by shooting at the ceiling, and demands Gabby choose between her cute little boyfriends, since he only needs one of them to do the heavy work of putting in random posts in the middle of fields. But he needs her. Look, I have seen this plot but this is a Left Behind film so they refuse to commit to the obvious implications. Anyway, he is down two guys at last count, even if he captures all the other escapees, so this doesn’t even make sense if he’s using the men for security and manual labour.

Anyway we never find out who Gabby would choose (Flynn, obviously) because Damon fails to see the giant hole in the floor and falls through in the most Disney death ever.

Extremely disappointing that they didn’t go for the obvious impalement here, but we’ve already established that practical effects are not their strong point. Everyone hugs, which is to say Gabby and Flynn hug (cute) and Josh and Claire hug (creepy).

The prisoners are back and everyone sits around the campfire. Flynn asks Gabby if she’s doing okay. She lost both of her parents within the space of somewhere between 24 and 72 hours, but sure. She’s okay. Everything is okay.

She asks what are the chances that everything worked out the way it did. You mean your mom getting disintegrated, your BFF’s parents and your sister’s best friend getting disintegrated, getting kidnapped by a cult, you getting beaten up, your dad getting shot, and his murderer falling through a random hole? I would say not great, but also not really evidence of a divine plan or anything like that. Flynn thinks they got lucky. Ahahahaha what.

Then she teleports away from the campfire (what even is the 180° rule?) and monologues to her dead dad about how she believes in God now.

The kids all leave the remaining escaped cultists around the fire and go to look for food.

They find a fully stocked convenience store that hasn’t been looted. It has electricity and people are paying for things with money. Josh throws the entire timeline and continuity of the film into chaos by asking when the power came back on (it never went out) and the woman says “the day before yesterday.”

This means we can now move onto my favourite bit of every Left Behind movie, the infodump. 75% of Chicago is back online. They’re setting up shelters, which doesn’t make any sense, as given the disappearances, there is no longer a housing shortage of any kind. People are starting to go back to work, which makes perfect sense as now they don’t have to worry about daycare or childcare arrangements of any sort. I guess elementary school teachers are shit out of luck, though. As soon as she says that the military has set up curfews and barricades, Gabby tells Josh that it’s time to go home. I know for me, there’s nothing more welcoming than a police state.

They bury Eric to more Christian contemporary music, then there’s another geographically baffling scene where the kids say goodbye to Sarah while a Greyhound bus waits for them. They’re now in the suburbs. Is this where Sarah lives? Where are they in relation to the woods where Eric is buried and the convenience store and the abandoned Leaning Tower of Pisa you know what, never mind, I don’t care. Gabby wants to go home because she has friends (really?) and needs them to also know about Jesus. Everyone hugs and promises to visit each other. These people live in walking distance from each other.

Well, we don’t get a Cuck Tent but we do get a Cuck Bus, where first Gabby and Josh sit together while Flynn looks on enviously, then Gabby and Claire sit together with Flynn and Josh sitting together behind them. They watch more of the Rapture video. How long is this bus ride? They walked to the cult compound! Conveniently, they hear the bit where Billings warns about the Antichrist. Out the window, they notice drones flying overhead and soldiers driving by in a Jeep.

Finally, they reach the exact block where the reporter was giving her newscast. Flynn and Josh notice that everything is back to normal. Haha okay.

At long last, we finally get our view of Nicolae Carpathia, two minutes before the film ends.

I have mixed feelings here. On the one hand, this is one of the worst Nicolaes. The best is, of course, Gordon Currie, the only person in the original films who looks like he’s having any fun. Randy LaHaye, grandson of Tim LaHaye, does not even attempt a Romanian accent and is nowhere near handsome or campy enough for the role. If Nicolae doesn’t sound like Nandor the Relentless from What We Do In the Shadows why are we even doing this? On the other hand, this is RANDY LAHAYE, so it’s objectively hilarious, and the speech about restoring order course-corrects a major flaw in the books and previous movies, which is why anyone goes along with the Antichrist’s schemes. Anyway, with their newfound Christian decoder rings, the girls can tell he’s up to no good. The scene is actually pretty effective—it’s the kind of scene that’s hard to fuck up, but given that all of the other films except maybe the first one do fuck it up, I’ll give the film a pass and say the ending is quite strong.

Aww, RIP. Also RIP to Brad Johnson, the original Rayford Steele and the only other good actor in the first three movies. I didn’t know he died, but apparently covid took him out in 2022, making 2024’s Rise of the Antichrist’s anti-vaxxer stance particularly callous.