New on DVD from Frolic Films!

ABSOLUTE VOW (2017)

Directed by Jared Masters
Written by Jared Masters
Starring Parker Love Bowling, Kansas Bowling, Rodney Bingenheimer, Lloyd Kaufman, Aki Aleong, Meg Dick, Dawna Lee Heising, Kalvin Madsen, Daphne Fischer, Dannah Hooper, Marley Uribe, Sierra Renfro, Aaron Berjohn, Art Roberts, Thomas Ronca, Wendy Pauline McKinney, Dallas Chandler, & Troy Alexander as Christ!
Find out more about this film here

Jared Masters offers up an ambitious, low budget biblical ode with ABSOLUTE VOW.

Set one thousand years before Christ was born, a young virgin (Parker Love Bowling) is to be sacrificed to God by her father and makes a journey across treacherous terrain accompanied by six other maidens. Along the way they meet Satan, a shepherd, a leper, a magician (Troma’s Llyod Kaufman), the Madonna, and Christ himself, among other eccentric folks. But by the time she reaches her destination, the virgin has seen and gathered much in her journey and may not be the sacrifice her father originally intended her to be.

While this film feels self indulgent at times and spends an awful lot of runtime wandering along the countryside with public domain classical music playing in the background, I have to admire the scope of which Jared Masters is reaching for in ABSOLUTE VOW. Reminiscent of John Waters, Masters has his own cadre of actors and non-actors who pop up in all of his films. His films seem more about the journey rather than the point of it all. The film’s highlight is the offbeat cameo by Lloyd Kaufman as a magician who only has a limited amount of power. Most of the other actors recite their lines rather dryly and this film is basically a lot of wandering around the desert outside of Hollywood, but there’s an offbeat charm to everything going on here. This isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you’re interested in theatre of the weird, ABSOLUTE VOW definitely fits the bill.