Review of Manna from Heaven

This is a terrible film. It has no redeeming qualities whatsoever and why Shirley Jones, Cloris Leachman, Louis Fletcher and the late Frank Gorshin would lend their names and reputations to it is anybody's guess. At the screening I attended the Burton Sisters were there and one of them made an announcement to say that this was a moral tale with old fashioned values. Then the film came on: the first scene was so bad it was embarrassing. I knew the Burton Sisters were sitting behind me in the small screening room and didn't know how to react. It made me cringe. The script, the directing and the acting were so bad that I thought this can only get better – it didn't. This kind of film puts women's film making back fifty years. When the announcement said there would be old fashioned values I expected something like 'Miracle on 34th Street' or 'It's a Wonderful Life' or at least an attempt at something in that genre but this was amateur night out. In the sixties Frank Gorshin was the Jim Carrey of his day; but he was the type of actor who needed a director to hone his talents if he ventured into film - we all remember him from the Batman series. In this the directors let him do a very bad French accent which would have fooled nobody let alone the person he was trying to con in the movie. The directors were Gabrielle Burton and Maria Burton and the leading actress was Ursula Burton – the producers were seven Burtons altogether and two others so it is a very expensive home movie. At the end of the film – and I did stay to the end – a list of 'angels' which were presumably the investors in this piece of garbage preceded the cast list and it is very hard to believe that these people actually thought that this film was going to make them money – when great directors find it hard to raise money for films and this terrible terrible film which wasted nearly two hours of people's time gets made something is wrong – and who are these people who are writing good reviews for this movie on this site? I wonder!