What makes it different from others?

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Directed by John Huston, "Wise Blood" is an adaptation of a 1952 Flannery O'Connor novel of the same name. It stars Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes, the grandson of a staunch Christian. When he returns to the American South after World War 2, Hazel decides to start a church of his own.Huston's film largely omits what made O'Connor's novel memorable. O'Connor, who wrestled with her own Catholicism, set her tale in a racist, puritanical, post-war America. Moulded by religious family members, her characters saw themselves as being "unclean" and "guilty of sin". The faintest desires, the slightest sexual acts, sent O'Connor's characters into a tailspin, each viewing themselves as having committed a transgression against God.But O'Connor's novel went beyond simple Catholic Guilt. Culturally indoctrinated to view African Americans as being "unclean", O'Connor's guilt-ridden characters begin to view themselves as being "black". Self-identifying with African Americans, they perceive themselves as being tarred, blighted, outcasts and so intrinsically unworthy. O'Connor then drew parallels between slavery and Christianity; both were methods of inculcating obedience. Both promised redemption only after impossible, and obscene, forms of discipline.John Huston's "Wise Blood" touches upon these themes. Huston's characters try to reject God, they put stones in their shoes as penance and wear gorilla costumes as a form of quasi-racist punishment. More shockingly, they gouge out their eyeballs and lacerate their own bodies. But as Huston's film is obviously set in the racially integrated 1970s, and as it makes no attempts to convey the mood, mannerisms and psycho-social realities of the 1940s, these themes feel half-baked. In subtle ways, the Bible Belt of 1979 was not the Bible Belt of 1948. Huston either doesn't care about these subtleties, or honestly expects us to believe that his film is set in the 1940s.7.9/10 – Flawed but fascinating. See "Elmer Gantry".

A hefty percentage of the comments on "Wise Blood" dwell on its relationship to the novel from which it was drawn -- pro and con. Brilliant faithful adaptation says one moviegoer. Trashy sacrilege screams another. Those of us who haven't read the book are stuck with the movie which balances superb atmosphere with strange storytelling. Let's start on the plus side. John Huston and his crew have caught not only the look but the feel, almost the smell, of a midsize southern town in Summer. The weathered frame houses, the sagging streets, the one-screen cinema, the tired used car lot with its rusty Ford Fairlanes, they form a richly authentic backdrop for the action. That's where "Wise Blood" gets into trouble. Who is Hazel,played by Brad Dourif, what war did he emerge from, why does he want to be a preacher and most of all, why does he suffer psychotic temper tantrums? You'll have to figure that out for yourself -- along with why a would-be acolyte steals an embalmed monkey for him and why the nymphet daughter of a "blind" evangelist is smitten with him, down to her threadbare stockings. Sure, there are allegorical references galore throughout the film. The phoniness of Gonga, the gorilla (a bruiser in an ape suit) matched against the phoniness of street corner preachers. But in the end, maybe you'll say to yourself (but never breathe a word to more ephemeral friends)I just wish the darned thing made more sense.

Everything about this movie was supposed to be perfect, from the great American source novel of Flannery O'Connor, to the spot-on casting of Brad Dourif, Ned Beatty, and Harry Dean Stanton, to the direction of the legendary John Huston. So what went wrong? Answer: the very conception of how to tell this story. This was undoubtedly meant to be a vivid, colorful, literary, even surrealistic story of a man's personal obsession with and against the great excesses of Southern revivalist Christianity. A movie like this should have been made by someone with the visual flair of Tim Burton or the Coen Bros. Instead, it reminded me of an early Richard Linklater movie like "Slacker," following a meandering path of disconnected vignettes with Southern weirdos spouting their own idiosyncratic dialogue into thin air. Now, much of this dialogue is utterly hilarious and beautifully written (and supposedly verbatim from O'Connor's novel), but great dialogue alone does not a great film make.A film like this could only have been made in the 1970s, an era when filmmakers could helm projects which tackled very taboo subject matter (in this case the mother of all of them - religion). It's a shame it could never be made by a major studio in today's politically-correct climate, because if done right it would make an amazing literary period-piece. Who is this main character Hazel Moates really? We get to seem him do a series of some of the most insane things in modern cinema (off-screen), yet we never get a real character exposition. If someone is going to make a serious multi-layered satire of religion, they had better be prepared to go places visually and aesthetically for the viewer, and this movie does not. In addition, when is this movie supposed to take place (the cars are all contemporary 1970s, yet O'Connor's era of itinerant revivalist preachers wearing suits and hats ended in the 1950s)? Finally, Alex North's twangy hillbilly score is probably the most aesthetically incorrect soundtrack ever, next to the kazoo-and-banjo score from "Last House on the Left."

"Wise Blood" is a rambling, ambling film about a young soldier who returns from the war and embarks on a career as an anti-religious street preacher. Brad Dourif plays Hazel, whose returning home from his ostensible tour in Vietnam seems much more like a release from a long prison stint. He doesn't seem to know anyone, or anything about modern society. He is strangely out of place in a strangely underpopulated and anachronistic universe. I kept asking myself if the film was supposed to take place in the present-day 1979 or the fifties? This is what happens to a Director's eye as he gets older...Brad Dourif is a wonderful actor... always unafraid, always making original and unusual choices in his performances. Hollywood seems to consider him too much of an oddball to play the Lead, but I think that's exactly what makes him so fascinating... Amy Wright stars as Sabbath Lily, and almost completely steals the show with her magnetic eyes, expressive face, and wonderful comedic timing. Harry Dean Stanton also gives a great performance as a blind rival preacher.The movie has great actors and some genuinely funny bits: Hazel's defensiveness about his car, Sabbath Lily's lustful pursuits, Ned Beatty's new Messiah, the gorilla sequence... but these seem at odds with the extraordinarily dark themes that lie beneath the surface, and the pointedly-bitter finale. It's a shame this movie didn't gel into something more cohesive and memorable, but it definitely earns points for originality... it is like no movie you have ever seen before, and for that reason alone it is a winner.GRADE: B-