Gospel of Deceit (2006 TV Movie) User Reviews

A Really Bad Movie Turns Absolutely Hilarious At The End

[sddavis63 · 5/10 · 13 January 2008]

What to say about this typically schlocky made for TV soap opera/movie? Most of the way through this is simply bad. I'll give Alexandra Paul (who?) credit for being a pretty sexy preacher's wife as Emily Wendell, whose husband Ted is the pastor of some large Community Church and who is so totally obsessed with his ministry that he apparently doesn't notice that he has a pretty sexy wife! Actually the best line of the movie belongs to Ted (J.C. Mackenzie - I know, another "who?") when he says to Emily "I am the church. This is just a building the Lord put me in." Speaking as a pastor myself, I howled at that one.

Anyway, the movie moves along at a frenetic pace with the plot not really being very well developed, but as far as it goes, Emily falls for a young, mysterious drifter (Luke, played by Corey Sevier) who appears out of nowhere and sweeps her off her feet. The interplay between Ted, Emily and Luke makes clear that the movie is at least well named, as one lie follows another until the story is so absolutely confusing that you almost give up. Then comes the last and perhaps unintentionally hilarious scene in the church, as Emily confronts Ted about his lies in front of the congregation and a live television audience. Until then I thought this movie might get a 2 or 3, but the end is really so funny that I have to raise this to a 5.

Mainstream Porn for American WASP Women

[benoit-3 · 5/10 · 4 October 2009]

A preacher's wife (think Reverend Lovejoy's wife from "The Simpsons") gets her bony ass regularly shtupped by a muscle-bound sex-monkey drifter cute-as-a-button boy-toy with a very high-maintenance pompadour hair-do (think Snake from "The Simpsons") just as her sanctimonious husband is about to conclude a lucrative televangelism deal. Complications ensue. There is nothing wrong with this film once you admit it's really pornography for women. There is really nothing unnatural about that, per se. Some works of this genre have attained cult and classic status, like, say, oh, I don't know, "Jane Eyre". Everybody with ovaries enjoys this kind of pastime. It's just regrettable that American women - and Anglo-Saxon White Protestant women especially - feel that their pleasure can only be complete with the inclusion of large doses of guilt, deceit, bitchiness, gossip, mental illness, paranoia, greed, medical near-emergencies, police and media involvement, skeletons in the closet, triple-generational incest, double adultery, shame, ruined reputations, scandal, murder, blackmail, public exposure, bad driving and ultimately humiliation, punishment, mutilation or death of the "guilty" parties. Refer again to all the works of the Brontë sisters and their Gothic Harlequin romance and afternoon soap-opera descendants. Everyone should be able to enjoy sex when they can, but why all the hypocrisy?

The film score alternates between torridly sexy sax solos for the soft porn scenes and abysmal "fear music" that would make the History Channel proud for everything else. A Black Gospel choir is also trotted out on stage every time the viewer might be forgiven for concluding those small-town fundamentalist Christian nutjobs must surely be racist Republican tea-baggers to boot.

Crashing God's Party

[wes-connors · 4/10 · 14 June 2014]

While celebrating her 20th wedding anniversary, still attractive Alexandra Paul (as Emily) notices an incredibly handsome young man is watching her outdoor party. Naturally, the solution to this problem is to invite sexy Corey Sevier (as Luke McElroy) to dinner. Although it initially startles Ms. Paul, preacher husband and aspiring televangelist J.C. MacKenzie (as Ted Wendell) hires Mr. Sevier as their handyman. Yes, he will come in handy. The muscular hunk moves onto the estate and pretends to read Shakespeare. We know who's going to copulate with Sevier when the lady of the house walks in on him shirtless. Sevier oozes sex appeal and washboard abs. Of course, this complicates Paul's "church lady" image and could ruin Mr. MacKenzie's religious career...

This "Lifetime" TV movie follows the well-worn "forbidden sex" theme mixed with religion formula. "Gospel of Deceit" is an unabashed "bad boy" sex fantasy for married women, and it certainly works on that level, with Sevier effortlessly bringing home the bacon. He looks good in and out of his shirt, and even gets to show a little cheek. Paul shows her skin, too, with a psychotic nude "sheet" scene that lowers performance levels. The story is ridiculous, but director Timothy Bond and his team do move it along quickly, taking advantage of each soap opera-type development without letting anything drag it down. The silliness gets worse as the plot get so tangled it becomes laughable. Writer John Benjamin Martin was astute in having Sevier think "Hamlet" was a comedy.

**** Gospel of Deceit (4/28/06) Timothy Bond ~ Alexandra Paul, J.C. MacKenzie, Corey Sevier, Zoie Palmer

If you want to see Corey Sevier shirtless, this is the TV movie for you

[babettex5 · 2/10 · 31 January 2007]

I am watching this movie right now on WTN because that was the channel that the TV was turned to when I turned it on. It is a not very credible and fairly boring story about a minister's wife (Alexandra Paul) falling in lust with a young stud/drifter (with washboard abs) played by Corey Sevier. There may or may not be a plot. Corey whips his shirt off a lot and Alexandra swoons. I'm getting the feeling he's supposed to be up to no good, and that's why he's messing with skinny Alexandra Paul. It's not really important because as I said he takes his shirt off a lot and I just caught a glimpse of butt cleavage. There's a lot of sax on the soundtrack, which is just painful.

Unintentionally funny!

[thewritebrain · 1/10 · 16 January 2010]

This movie is so bad it's good -- in an unintentionally funny way. I couldn't stop watching it, I was laughing so much! It's like a parody of a romantic thriller, except it's not a parody.

Alexandra Paul plays Emily Wendell, an oppressed preacher's wife who falls hard for Luke (Corey Sevier), a hunky and mysterious drifter who we eventually learn was in prison; the only thing Sevier is guilty of, though, is bad acting! Mind you, he's no worse than the other actors. You get the sense that the actors have *no* idea they're in a really awful film; they're playing it straight. Everything about the film is bad: the acting, the script, the love scenes, the pacing, the plot twists, the choice of music. The climactic scenes are just so ludicrous -- first the shootout in the church, then Luke's final words to Emily -- I was howling with laughter.

Evidently Luke did a lot of weight lifting and ab crunches in prison, and we get to see plenty of his naked torso. That's probably the highlight of the film.

Double Cringe

[ga-bsi · 3/10 · 17 May 2009]

I watched this movie last week sometime and had the biggest laugh i've had in a long while. The plot of the film is pretty dumb and convoluted in a badly crafted way. The only plus to be found anywhere in the film are Corey Savier's impressive abs. Alexandra Paul (i think that's her name) is horrendous as the preacher's wife who has a history of depression. Ted McKenzie is gross and his character's a twit on top of it all. And as if the fact that you think she's having sex with her son isn't enough, they throw in needless sax solos at every opportunity! The end and climax of this film is absolutely abysmal and also laughable. I mean who the hell wants to carry the child of a con who tried to make you think he was your son and that you were having an incestuous relationship with him!

Lots of Twists

[tomfsloan · 6/10 · 6 January 2019]

Quite entertaining despite the slow moving start. There were a lot of plot twists and surprises that kept it interesting. There were also a few pointless points, but not enough to be disruptive. The gun scene in the church was dumb. Wasn't it convenient the sheriff happened to be standing right where he was. What makes this movie different from most is that the three principals (the pastor, his wife, and the guy) were technically all bad. You weren't exactly sure who to root for towards the end.

I'm feeding the multitude

[sol-kay · 6/10 · 22 June 2011]

***SPOILERS*** It's when the righteous and God fearing preacher Ted Wendell, J.C Meckenzie, was about to get his very own national televised TV show to spread the word of love and doing on to others that you would want done unto yourself that this handsome hungry and mysterious drifter Luke Mcilroy, Corey Sevier, shows up at Ted's church picnic, where everyone is invited, to wolf down a free ham & cheese sandwich.

Not only do all the girls at the church picnic notice the boyishly handsome and somewhat weird Luke but Ted's wife Emily, Alexandra Paul, notices him too! Given a place to stay at the church by the very kind and attentive Ted Luke's true colors start to surface. Before you know it Luke got Emily fawning all over him behind her husbands Ted's back with Ted not for once noticing, in him always counting the church's daily donations, what's going on between the two. Luke stripping off his clothes doesn't waste any time in bedding down a shocked and confused Emily to the heavy saxophone like, that sounds like 50,000 ton ship's foghorn, X-rated music that if it didn't burst your eardrums, even with ear plugs stuck inside them, would have woken up the dead if it reached a decibel or two higher!

**SPOILERS***Just when you and Emily thought that things couldn't get any worse Luke come up with the shocking revelation that he's in fact Emily's son that she thought she had aborted when she was a teenager before she met her husband Ted! What's even worse is that Emily found out after getting her annual check-up that she pregnant and that Luke, her son, is the father! It's now up to Emily to pay off her "son" with $50,000.00 of the church's money or else he'll spill the beans on her past sins and thus destroy her husbands career as a big time TV evangelist before it even beings!

***MAJOR SPOILERS*** We soon find out that there's more going on in the movie then what meets the eye or brain in that Ted himself planned this whole charade well ahead of time in order to both drive Emily insane and to kill herself so he can keep all the fame and money in his new found career as a TV evangelist to himself! In Ted's sick mind having his terribly abused wife Emily exposed as the very worst kind of a women will in fact gain him sympathy among his flock as well as jack up his TV ratings that really haven't been going anywhere lately! In the end it's Luke himself who saw the light in what he was involved in and secretly taped Ted at his favorite hangout,a biker bar, where he laid out his plans to do in his wife.

The unbelievable final few minutes of the movie are so mind boggling that I had to watch them about a half dozen times, on DVD, just to make sure that I wasn't hallucinating when I saw them! With Emily who was supposed to be dead of a drug overdose popping up in the church as Ted was giving a sermon about right and wrong and Luke showing up dressed all in leather and pulling out a tape-recorder exposing what a low-life and murderous rat Ted really was! As pandemonium broke out all Ted could think of was to gun down, after grabbing Officer Burke's(Trevor Bain)service revolver, both Emily and Luke in order to shut them up! But by then it was too late for him with the entire congregation, as well as the tens of thousands watching this spectacle on live TV, seeing just what a kind of a man Ted was which wasn't what he always claimed to be: A Man of God!

I laughed and I laughed

[apmulhearn · 9/10 · 16 June 2022]

Rob McElhenny look-alike Corey Sevier delivers, over and over, absurd twists, turns, and surprises.

Alexandra Paul is the Queen of Lifetime, and this movie earned her the crown.

Is it a GOOD movie? I suppose not, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. But it is original for sure. And hilarious.

It's so bad it's a MUST SEE!

[rossmcfarlen · 10/10 · 7 December 2019]

When the pastor's wife enters a passionate relationship with an ex-con we know we're on Planet Soap.

Expect lots of suds, sobs and unexpected tears accompanied by hysterical howls of laughter.

Abortion is pretty good overall.

[tweeders55 · 9/10 · 27 March 2015]

Wow, this movie steals from everything in tragic literature, bad awful offal and yet I'm trying to turn it off and just somehow can't. Actually a pretty good Lifetime movie overall. I wish I could say High Camp but the actors are all playing it for true. Its a direct hit on religion. Me Likey. Makes me glad that being the cougar I am I never had babies so I'll never have to worry about having sex with my decedents. Uh did Oprah write this? Kinda like every Oprah book-list novel ever written. Hits VC Andrews big time too. It ain't bad for a Friday afternoon of cock-tailing. It gets better, the cinematography is great and all of the extras are really into it. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! SMOKE BOWL !!!!! NEED TEN MORE LINES WITHOUT Spoilers. Life is good there is a very "HAPPY ENDING" and I didn't have to pay for it.