Honk For Jesus, Save Your Soul (Blu-ray Review)
Organized religion and scandal often go hand in hand. Embezzlement, trafficking, drugs, sex scandal… Rampant in the church communities. There seems to elementally be something rotten in the state of Denmark – Denmark being church, and the rotten being the church leader a lot of the time. This is the subject of Honk For Jesus, Save Your Soul, an ambitious satirical mockumentary from Adamma Ebo. Read more about the scandalous laughs below and be sure to check out the paid link at the end to score a copy of Honk For Jesus on Blu-ray!
Film 
Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. is a satirical comedy starring Regina Hall as Trinitie Childs – the proud first lady of a Southern Baptist megachurch, who together with her husband Pastor Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown), once served a congregation in the tens of thousands. But after a scandal forces their church to temporarily close, Trinitie and Lee-Curtis must reopen their church and rebuild their congregation to make the biggest comeback that commodified religion has ever seen.
When we meet Lee-Curtis and Trinitie Childs, they’re on the brink of reopening their church Wander To Greater Paths. Once upon a time, the megachurch had hundreds in the congregation, giving back to the community and also healthily lining their pockets. Lee-Curtis is all about the drip – in an early scene you see him lose it over stepping in gum in a pair of designer shoes. Upon a tour of their closet, Trinitie and Lee-Curtis both show a taste for expensive clothing and their mansion is decked out too, not to mention their luxury car lined driveway. There was a time when the Pastor and his First Lady had it all. That is, until the scandal. Lee-Curtis, not unlike a good chunk of conservative pastors has a taste for young men. He has been accused by 5 men of coercion, and instead of fighting for his innocence (It’s implied that he is aware of what he’s done, as is Trinitie), they couple decide to settle out of court and intend to re-save Lee-Curtis to move on and reopen the church in hopes of redemption.
As we all know, this is the ideal road that films almost never take. Lee-Curtis is of course, no longer attracted to his wife, if he ever was in the first place, and he still has desires to be with men as evidenced in his flirtation with one of the documentary crew who are following the “power couple” on their demented road to redemption. And in the middle of all of this is Trinitie, trying to smile through everything, showing her strength outside while holding a heartbreaking sense of dread inside.
The film is done in a mocumentary style that a Christopher Guest fan like me can spot a mile away. The premise isn’t too far off from reality and even more interesting is seeing this portrayed in a southern black church. The film doesn’t shy away from the ideals of many churches in the south, with congregants either brushing off any scandalous allegations, or jumping ship to rival churches (like Heaven’s Home in the film…) while judging their church leaders for being human or hiding their truths. The seething homophobia that runs rampant in black churches is shown here too. Adamme Ebo is unapologetic with her point of view here and that brings in some much-needed blunt reality to the proceedings.
It’s on the shoulders of Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall that Honk For Jesus rides. They bring a gaudy and swagger filled sensibility to their roles. It’s a little sleazy, and in the scene I mentioned before… with lines like, “There’s something about a pastor in Prada…” that make you think of the show-off scenes in a film like Goodfellas. Things look great on the outside. They must when you can buy $2,300 church hats, and pull up to your megachurch in a Bugatti. But we know that this life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, of course. This is why we laugh when we see what the documentary crew is doing with other people they interview, why we balk at the random pep-talky hamminess to the Childs’ interviews, or why we cringe with Lee-Curtis asks Trinitie to do some praise miming to engage people into coming to their upcoming service. You will find equal room to cringe and crack up if you’re paying enough attention.
Video
Encoding: MPEG-4 AVC
Resolution: HD (1080p)
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1, 1.66:1 ,1.33:1
Layers: BD-50
Clarity/Detail: Honk For Jesus was filmed in several aspect ratios to show the differences in the footage made for the in-film documentary, the film itself and archival church footage. The clarity and detail is deliberate throughout with the sharpest footage coming from the documentary imagery. These scenes are brighter and more color-pop rich than the “Movie” footage. The archival footage is soft and ugly, also on purpose. There are a lot of great textures throughout, on display in clothing, hats, shoes, car and home interiors and even in something as small as church seating.
Depth: Regardless of which scenes you watch, the depth of field in each scene is excellent. The camera movements are fluid and organic and foregrounds and backgrounds look generally marvelous here.
Black Levels: Black levels are nice and deep without of course going to the level of a 4K presentation.
Color Reproduction: Colors are often warm throughout, with brightly colored outfits being a place of note for detail throughout. There are darker moments, mostly indoors or at night, but when we’re in natural light, it’s almost always sunny and makes for a gorgeous color palette in most of the film.
Flesh Tones: Flesh tones are gorgeously accurate for the entire film.
Noise/Artifacts: Clean.
Audio
Audio Format(s): English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, Spanish DTS 5.1
Subtitles: English SDH, French, Spanish
Dynamics: Honk for Jesus is dialogue driven first and foremost, and so dynamically speaking, the mix is mostly in the center channel. The rest of the film plays around in the front channels mostly with mild ambiences appearing from time to time in the surrounds.
Height: N/A
Low Frequency Extension: Bass is set up for a few instances of music, but nothing else besides that.
Surround Sound Presentation: Surrounds add echo to megachurches, outdoor ambience and mall atmosphere.
Dialogue Reproduction: Dialogue being the main focus, it’s presented perfectly throughout.
Extras
Special features for Honk For Jesus are basic as you can get. The film comes home with a slipcover and a digital code. There is a short alternate opening (HD, 1:46) that was cut for obvious reasons, with another 8 minutes of deleted and alternate scenes that would have possibly made the film drag a bit. Finally, we get a short Gag Reel that didn’t manage to do much for me, as a big fan of gag reels.
Summary
This is a small and thought-provoking film, and one that has been its own quiet scandal since it’s release. Review bombs on IMDb and CinemaScore paint a rather negative picture of the movie and will likely influence people to steer clear. For me, I came into the film knowing there wasn’t going to be a laugh out loud, holler at the screen experience ahead of me. I found myself chuckling, thinking and at one point, for one scene, guffawing (The leads do a word for word rap along to the dirty south classic Knuck if You Buck that will buckle you over…). I do believe this film is worth a watch, and if nothing more, can shed some light on something that goes on in churches like Wander To Greater Paths. You feel for Trinitie in her humiliations and her suffering, and you wish that she and Lee-Curtis would split up, mainly so Lee-Curtis can live his truth, and Trinitie can be free to find herself not relying on the man she loves to provide her every happiness. That’s a lot to think on for a film being deemed as merely a comedy. Recommended.
