I’m not sure where to start with this review, so I’ll quote Emma: “That was the worst movie I’ve ever seen.”

For me, Maria, it’s a close second to Long Distance Princess. I’m not sure anything can top that. But, Welcome to Paradise is a plotless mess. 

The movie begins in a big city church with female pastor Debby, her hair layered in the typical 2007 style, removing her robes and preaching in her power suit because she’s too hot in the robes. She puts the confused churchgoers through the always annoying exercise of turning to the person next to you and greeting them. After church, the senior pastor grills her in his office and tells her she’s going to be sent to Paradise, Texas to pastor the church there because the “disrobing” sent the “local bishop” over the edge. 

Cut to Debby telling her teenage son, Hayden, they’re moving and in this scene we learn Debby’s husband died a couple of years ago and Hayden is having a hard time adjusting. Hayden yells at his mom but he’s breathing really weird and it looks like he’s trying not to smile which distracted us to the point where we didn’t care about his anger. Then we’re treated to a montage of Hayden walking around town dribbling a basketball. He has three outfit changes so I guess he does this often.

After the (too long) dribbling montage, Debby is seen receiving local wisdom from a woman who looks like Brad Ellis dressed up like an old woman. Debby says something lame and Bradwina laughs hysterically. Then we’re at school with Hayden who is called to read in front of the class. He can’t. He stumbles through a simple sentence and the teacher realizes something isn’t right with young Hayden. 

Hayden plays angsty basketball in the darkened school gym, chain on his saggy pants, and out from the shadows creeps an old looking Hank from Dr. Quinn. What he’s doing in this film I’ll never know. He’s wearing a t-shirt tucked into sweatpants and white tennis shoes. He starts playing ball with Hayden and says he’s the basketball coach but he doesn’t try to get Hayden on the team despite the fact that the kid doesn’t miss a basket.

Debby meets a homeless man named Trevor, who plays guitar and sings. She invites him to the church to play and we’re wondering where the church’s choir is. Debby preaches her first sermon, which is not good, and everyone is uncomfortable. Trevor sings a song while Debby sits on the communion rail? and everyone awkwardly claps after the song. When Debby is dropping Trevor off at his street corner, she meets a homeless woman named Frances and Debby makes an instant friend. 

Debby meets with Hayden’s teacher and learns for the first time her son has Dyslexia and we’re all yelling about how no one else noticed this problem before this kid reached his teens. 

At the next church service, Debby gives a sermon about a black guy getting turned away from a church in the old days, then she belts out a song. After church they have a potluck picnic and it’s going well. Frances stands up and gives an overly long and emotional speech about the people helping her…although it doesn’t seem like any of these people have really helped her much considering she’s living on the streets. Also, why does this small town have SO MANY HOMELESS PEOPLE?? 

After Frances’ speech, the camera jumps back as if it were frightened and the sky is black. I wondered if we were to witness either the Second Coming or a tornado. The wind picks up and another long montage scene happens with the picnickers slowly picking up one plate at a time, moving tables and chairs, and slowly, slowly tearing down the picnic set up in no hurry as leaves blow through and the sky darkens even more. This is a strange scene and quite hilarious due to the odd editing, the fake black sky, and the general air of, “we don’t care if the picnic blows away or not.”

Debby gives Frances permission to sleep on the porch of the church to stay out of the rain after Frances refuses Debby’s invitation to stay at her house. It’s raining and we’re shown a short scene of Frances sleeping beside a trash can fire then Debby gets a call. The church has burned. It’s a total loss. Frances is brought down to the police station as a suspect and John, who is the assistant pastor and an overall sleazy guy, makes derogatory remarks. Debby gets in John’s face and tries to get all macho but all she can spit out is, “Her name is Frances.” I (Catherine) was less than impressed. 

We’re then told John didn’t pay the last two months’ premium on the church’s insurance causing it to lapse, so they can’t rebuild and Emma went, “John burnt down the church to get Debby out of the picture!” I wanted to agree with her, I really did, but I told her, “I’m not sure if this movie can handle a plot that big.”

It couldn’t. Frances is in town, released by the fuzz, and Debby comes up to her after Frances is all “I hate my life” when a mom and her two daughters rush away from her after she creepily comes up and gets in one of the girls faces and says, “hey little girl aren’t you pretty!!!!” Frances starts weeping and apologizing for accidentally burning down the church. Was it an accident though? She gives Debby her only possession – a cross necklace her mom gave her as a child. 

Somewhere in between all these events, Hayden gets in a pathetic fistfight with John’s curly haired son and Coach Dylan breaks it up. He drives Hayden home and Hayden, the punk, has the audacity to whine about having to listen to country music in Dylan’s truck. He says, “I prefer hip hop” (of course you do, Hayden with your earring that appeared halfway through the film and looked more like a sharpie line drawn on the lobe) and Dylan smirks and changes the channel to a hip hop station. 

Coach Dylan and Debby have an awkward conversation about raking leaves and how no one needs to use turn signals in this small town cause everyone knows where you’re going. Ha. Ha. Debby says her husband passed away a couple of years ago and Hayden is having a hard time adjusting and this is the last time her husband’s death is mentioned. 

Debby finally addresses Hayden’s dyslexia problem by saying it’s not a big problem, giving him a poster of Albert Einstein, and not actually helping him at all. 

Coach Dylan tells Hayden his mom is having a rough time adjusting and he should help his mom and we’re yelling, WHAT ABOUT HAYDEN AND HIS ISSUES?? 

Patsy, from Patsy’s Pastries, tells Debby that she has a barn on her ranch she doesn’t use that they can turn into a church. 

Since the church was burned down by Frances and her trash can fire, Debby accepts and the townsfolk decide they have to turn the barn into a church in 24 hours. Then, the stakes are raised when that pesky local bishop comes on the scene and says that he’s “giving himself the authority to say” that unless they’re able to redo the barn in 24 hours, Paradise is not going to get another church and the people will have to drive 2 hours to Dallas for church. There are so many things I could point out here but they’re pretty obvious so I’ll leave it to you. 

So the skeleton crew arrives at the barn and it’s really not too bad for a temporary church. All they need to do is sweep and clean it and set some chairs out, right? Well, that would be the sensible and correct thing to do, so naturally Debby & Co. do the exact opposite. 

These people are going to totally make over this barn. Patsy didn’t bother to remove her crap from the barn before everyone shows up despite having five days to do it. Some people are slacking and hitting random pieces of wood with hammers, some people are removing boards from the barn, and basically these are the slowest moving workers I’ve ever met.

Then something happened to push me over the edge. They start painting the barn with long rollers. This is an old, weathered barn that doesn’t look as if it’s ever seen a lick of paint and they’re going to paint this entire barn in 24 hours. So, so stupid. And guess what, they not only paint the outside of the barn, they paint the inside as well. Totally and utterly unbelievable.

Prior to the insanity of the barn painting, there was an out of place scene with Patsy, Bradwina, and Johnny Boy’s wife in the beauty parlor. They had some “girl talk” for a minute and then suddenly Patsy is like, Johnny Boy’s Wife, where did you get that beautiful quilt? She pulls this ugly quilt out of a bag and says she got it on sale at an antique store. Patsy grabs it and drools over it, why I don’t know, it’s brown and rust colored and a boring pattern, and shrieks to Bradwina, “LOOK AT THIS STITCHING!!!” The women gather ’round the quilt, wipe tears from their eyes, and walk towards the camera til the quilt covers it and the scene changes. This bit of wildly creative camera work and this whole quilt scene brought Emma to her limit with the film. She began laughing so hard she was weeping and said it was the dumbest movie she’d ever seen. 

While these people are wringing their hands about how little time they have to paint this stupid barn, half of them take the time to convert a room in the barn into a bedroom for Frances. Frances is overjoyed at this shelter and they gift her the quilt by hanging it on the wall. We were wondering where Frances is supposed to go to the bathroom and make food. The bed looked like it would collapse if you sat on it. Instead of going out to help the workers finish the rest of the barn, Frances sits down in her new room and reads the bible. Slacker!

They work all through the night, except Frances, using the headlights on their cars to illuminate the barn as they finish painting. 

In the morning, Coach Dylan shows Debby the pulpit he built and the song “You Say It Best When You Say Nothing At All” is playing in the background and we were convinced they were going to kiss but they didn’t and that’s as far as their romance progressed.

Also, before the barn transformation montage, the crew joined hands and closed their eyes. For 30 solid seconds, we are treated to a weak flute rendition of Amazing Grace that sounds like it would be the background music in a Sarah McLaughlin ASPCA commercial. Then, Debby opens her mouth and we expect her to pray or something, but she just quotes the bible. At the end of the barn makeover, the song starts warbling again as the men use ropes to pull the cross up on top of the barn, somehow. It was literally only held up by a rope. Not sure how this worked, or how long it stayed up there. 

Where was Hayden this whole time, you ask. He was with a disabled boy and the curly haired punk son of Johnny making a freaking sign out of a freaking plank of wood with a screwdriver and a hammer. The most able-bodied individuals at the event were allowed to sit out the work and fiddle with their stupid sign. Can these people get any dumber? 

The sign simply says, “Paradise Church,” yet it’s treated like it’s the Ten Commandments. It’s nailed to the barn. Er, sorry, church. This barn has cracks between the boards and no insulation. There’s no way they can have services here in the winter. Argh, I hate this barn!

The service begins. The barn is packed, some people are sitting in the loft, Debby preaches badly again, the bishop or whatever shows up and smiles to show he’s not going to shut down their church. Then Debby announces Hayden is going to read something. Hayden gets up there and says, “I love you mom.” Then he reads the scripture, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you, which would have been pretty easy to memorize, if you ask me. And the movie ends with a vignette of the cross that’s hanging on top of the “church” by a thread and that horrid, horrid version of Amazing Grace blaring. I hated this movie, I never want to watch it again.