If there is a God, I’m sure that he/she/it/banana probably floats around the universe, watching our daily dealings with amusement, especially when it comes to the nature of cults, how people gather together in a tightly-knit group sometimes for the purpose of waiting for God to appear in some form. In the case of Chen Hon-Ming in Garland, Texas, it’s a matter of waiting for God to appear on a certain television channel. He also talks to God through a ring on his finger.
These are the souls that try men’s sanities, but Kia Simon has gathered the idea of them in a quirky manner that calls to attention why cults are possibly formed, how social barriers sometimes cause them to be formed, such as loneliness, failure of talent being tapped or challenged, and more. The most interesting personality featured here is Brother Meade, who speaks like Andre Gregory on a Dennis Hopper high. He talks of a white sticky substance covering the Earth and hardening, leading only lovers of God to rise up from it, and the rest to be trapped under there, to die, or do whatever it is cultists wish that the non-believers did.
Simon has a trick going on here though and if you’re keen, you’ll be able to catch it like I did, even before the end credits come up as Simon walks away into the maddening crowd. It’s very subtle, but it’s her way of commenting on cults themselves, how they build themselves up on fake ideas, and how the people involved are not all that real themselves. While the film does have the tendency to leave your head spinning at the end of its eight minutes, Simon is a unique unusual voice and incidentally, she’s in West Hollywood. Yes, here in Southern California, plenty of the voices that call out above the din of conformity have something very unusual to say and she is one of them.
