This movie begins with a doctor and an assistant trying to revive a man who has just suffered a massive coronary. The man's name is "Dr. Eric Robinson" (Dan Kruse) and he has purposely brought the condition upon himself. The cardiologist happens to be his best friend, "Dr. Carl Burke" (Terry Jernigen) and the woman assisting him is a psychiatrist named "Dr. Marissa Holloway" (Emilie Jo Tisdale). Anyway, as Eric is being brought back to life the first words he utters upon regaining consciousness is "Loose lips sink ships". Not long afterward he gets up out of his hospital bed and steals an ambulance. Now, rather than reveal too much of the plot and risk spoiling the film for those who haven't seen it I will just say that this is a movie about "Near Death Experiences" and how they relate to Christianity. That said, even though I think that this is an extremely interesting subject I must admit that I found the graphics, dialogue and some of the acting to be rather second-rate. No doubt the low-budget had much to do with this. In any case, although this film had its moments I thought that the end result was rather disappointing and I have rated this movie accordingly. Slightly below average.

I ran into this on late-night Christian TV. I was initially disappointed, as the story moved along somewhat ploddingly. It begins with a guy being revived from death in a hospital that looks like the basement of an oil refinery, that's lit entirely in red. Later, we discover that the patient is actually a doctor intrigued by reports of near-death experiences in which patients report seeing Heaven.Wanting to see for himself, he injects himself with a deadly cocktail, and calls a doctor friend to revive him.As it turns out, he travels through a tunnel of light to Heaven, which is an incredibly beautiful mountain range with lights flitting around. One of these lights turns into a human (presumably God), and informs the doctor that it "isn't his time" and he "has to go". Inexplicably, he's then thrown into Hell. If it isn't his time for Heaven, isn't it not his time for Hell, too? Anyway, he flies through a tunnel of fire and lands in the scorching plains of Hell, where he soon runs into a dead colleague who's begging for water. We learn via flashback that the reason the colleague was cast into Hell is that he channel-surfed past John Hagee on the TV. Wow...pretty touchy, God! As the doctor's friend revives him, he's drawn back to Earth, presumably to get all preachy on everyone with his newfound belief.I laughed long and loud at this film. It includes everything: the stereotypical smug and sneering atheist, the righteous convert, the ignorant scientist, and the silly mythology.A funny but happily short film. Might be good for drinking games at a party of heathen friends.

This is the kind of movie that is bound to get trolled by bored hipsters looking for an online fight to rile the blood. And, OK, maybe it deserves it a little bit. But in trashing this movie so, one skips over some very valid, very pertinent reasons why this movie is an abomination to cinema.One could, for example, take extensive issue with the film's theology. That's fair. No matter how closely it follows the scriptural account of how souls are sorted in the Christian afterlife, the enduring motif of the film, for the uninitiated humanist (the audience to whom the film is obviously trying to pander) is that "Hey, Jesus is kind of a dick." That's not, of course, to say that Jesus WAS a dick. Just that you wouldn't be able to make a fair assessment from this film's interpretation of the facts.All that, I might add, and Jesus/God the Father never ONCE even makes an appearance. What a ripoff.And though I could go on and on about the troubling theological implications of the film, and though I would not be totally unjustified in doing so (the back of the DVD, after all, suggests that it is the perfect conversation starter for unsaved neighbors and family), I feel the need to put aside such petty judgements and address the film's higher crimes and misdemeanors - that is to say, its crimes against narrative.Allow me to be succinct. This film sucks. Sucks, suck sucks. There no two ways about it. (The late Jerry Falwell thought enough of it to give it 4 stars, but I do not believe he has reviewed many other movies, therefore making hi standard for comparison weak at best). The dialogue is, at best, less than intellectually engaging; at worst, it is the kind of ham- handed buffoonery that would make Jack Chick cringe in disgust. The characters are little more than paper-bag puppets, existing from scene to scene, with little in the way of personal development or emotional maturity. They are worse than static caricatures; they change their personas as fits the convenience of the director, going - at least in the male lead's case - from Byronic anti-hero to love-hungry son, from hardcore rationalist to aesthetic humanist, all within a jaunty 76 minutes. Whew!Most perplexingly, though the film is called "Escape from Hell," we, the audience, see Hell for maybe 10-15 minutes, tops - at the very end. At least Dante had the good sense to drop us into the eponymous Inferno by the third chapter. And rest assured, it is filled with the kind of basic 3D CGI effects that for some reason may have passed muster in the 80s but have, in the years since Tron, become woefully outdated. (Satan, as it turns out, has a major thing for the Photoshop solarization filter. Oh, and the path t Hell is just like those tunnels in Sliders).Again, I must cut short a potentially-lengthy criticism and jump right to the point. Why do Christians feel the need to blindly praise every film that dares to call itself a "Christian film"? When critical judgement gives way to blind factional fist-pumping, we open dangerous doors - doors that, as history teaches us, lead us down paths lined with aggression, hate, and violence. I will not go so far as to far as to imply that Escape from Hell incites inter-religious hatred; I will, however, stand in abject defiance to all those who proclaim, without a whiff of objectivism, that this film is anything but a masturbatory endeavor for evangelical Christians under the hopeless guise of 'reaching out' to the unsaved. Anyone who has been 'saved' by this kind of pathetic storytelling is probably worth more lost.

This film was excellent. I'm so glad to see filmmakers of faith beginning to make quality movies. This film will really get you thinking about the reality of heaven and hell. For those who believe that the Bible is truly God's Word, an instruction manual to how to live life on earth, then this film maintains the accuracy of scripture. I like the way the director took a NDE (Near Death Experience) of someone who had not accepted Christ as Savior and their eyes were opened to what Hell is really like. His use of a fictional story to make a point worked very well. I highly recommend this film to anyone interested in NDE's or to find out what the Bible says about Heaven and Hell or life after death.