The two leads of this film do an adequate to excellent job all things considered. But that's really about the nicest thing I can say about this movie.The makers of this film either were trying to make a piece of blatant propaganda or were sincerely interested in giving a dynamic presentation of a complex issue but fell flat on their face. I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt and hope it was the latter. I will say this, the makers do seem to have an at least slightly more lucid understanding of the issue of school shootings than say, Michael Moore, or a lot of other mainstream Hollywood personalities do. For example, "I shot as many people as I did because I had to reset the precedent" is exactly the kind of thing a school mass shooter would say, maybe not after being arrested but before in his journals and "confession" tapes. They were able to recognize and convey the idea that infamy is at least almost as big a motive for people like Herman as "revenge" and that there is more too it than just "wahaha I was bullied so now I'm gonna show everyone by shooting up my school".The problem is, that little bit of remarkable perceptiveness and insight is completely balanced out by asinine and simplistic messages about other aspects of school shootings. Anyone who has researched the issue even a little in depth knows that the majority of school shooters are not really severely bullied and the ones that clear whole classrooms are especially unlikely to have been severely hazed, in fact they are often bullies themselves. This is not to say that it was "wrong" per se for them to portray Herman as having been a victim of hazing and cyberbullying, the filmmakers are not obligated to make him exactly like other school shooters and should be free to form their own interpretive framework, but they just really hammered it home too hard. Degrassi can be somewhat excused for their overly simplistic interpretation of the relationship between hazing and school shootings because they made that episode at a time when the narrative that the CHS shooters were just two bullied teens driven to the edge by extreme hazing was still the most widely accepted theory, but that notion has long since been debunked, and in 2012-2015 we should know better. I've seen a couple people ask why they chose to cast a pretty boy as the shooter. Well to be honest that was one of their better decisions, because the students who do this kind of thing really are often pretty boys, not acne-ridden overweight outcasts. I mean obviously it's true that a pretty boy can be a bullying victim as much as anyone else, but the narrative that the skinny emo kid that no one talks to is the most likely to attempt an act like this is a disingenuous and frankly dangerous one. Being antisocial does not automatically rank you at the bottom of the food chain.Every other aspect of the film is a jumbled mess. It seems like in an attempt to frame a dynamic "discussion" about school shootings they decided to try and shoe-horn in as many related topics as possible, but as a result they ended up taking the most juvenile and superficial approach to each one. There's that one political show that serves as an obvious and obnoxious allegory for Fox right-wing talk shows, which is really no more subtle than an SNL sketch about the same subject. There's a Michelle Bachman-like Republican legislator (they just couldn't resist including her party affiliation for the record) who I guess is supposed to p#ss us off with how b#tchy and unsympathetic to Herman she is except the film never really gives us any reason for us to fell all that sorry for him either. Then, as if in an attempt to make it more fair to conservatives, they have some liberal d##s##t commentator who is also presented as being just as much of a moron, along with his "killing people won't stop people from killing people" followers. Maybe the message was "hey look, talking heads who get involved in school shooting stories are nothing more than opportunistic bloodsuckers no matter which end of the political spectrum they hail from", but I doubt it.There's also some peripheral expository arch about Herman's sister having been killed by a car a couple years before the shooting, complete with way over-the-top sequences of him being haunted by her. The best I can tell is that since he felt it was his fault, that feeling of already having blood on his hands made him less apprehensive about the massacre, but they never really explain it in so much detail. There's also a side-story about Lax Morales's having rolled with a quasi-neonazi underground group during the days of his youth and possibly having been implicated as an accessory in the manslaughter death of a black teenager. The relevance this has to the rest of the movie is never flushed out; they clearly thought it was contributing to some kind of "hate breeds hate, violence breeds violence" message which I suppose could have worked but didn't.For people familiar with school shooting movies, "Zero Day" is usually the gold-standard. Now I don't think this film should have been "like Zero Day" and for the record I think some of the things they did were pretty clever. But watching Zero Day can help make clear some of the things that this film unquestionably did wrong.

Please do yourself a favor and watch something else.Anything else. This movie. Man, just when I didn't think the film could get any worse it did. I'm not sure who I should blame first. The director or the screenwriter. I think that the director takes the cake ( by that I mean the blame) for this movie. Mostly because of the horrible acting. Did anyone else see the crazy blonde lady that looked like she walked off SNL? How does a director let something like that happen? and the two lead men? Man did they try. Oh they tried to give us something. But Garret looked like a Disney kid who got lost. Another painful to watch performance came from the director herself staring as none other than boys mother. I think that out of the whole film only two people gave worth while performances. One was the female police offer who had two minutes of screen time and the beautiful Latina lead. They truly did a really good job when you look at the film as a whole. If only they hadn't been apart of this. The film lacked all vision. Nowhere at anytime could I see what they hell the filmmakers where trying to do. I wish that a film on this subject would have gone farther. Gave us something to really think about. But instead it gave us corny character names and cringe worth dialogue. The editing on this film was so amateurish I thought that I was watching the work of a film school drop out. The editor clearly was trying to use Lee Smith's tricks ( Lee Smith editor for many of Christopher Nolan's films) for flash backs and quick cuts. Not a single time was it done properly. Thank god Norman had the walking dead to go back to after this train wreck of a film. Over all the film is completely half baked.

Now don't get me wrong, I love the idea of a movie that sheds light on the issues that school bullying brings, but the attempt to humanize someone who took the lives of others is just too much. If you want a great film on the subject, I suggest Bully. A first hand account from people who live through bullying trumps a violent bloodbath being used to push someones agenda any day (you hear me Micheal Moore?) When I first heard about this film, I was excited. No, not because Daryl Dixon was going to play one of the leads, but because this is a very real problem in our society today, one that hits close to home for myself and my friends. I sat down with a friend to watch the trailer when it came out. Less than 30 seconds into the trailer, she was in the bathroom, puking. Why, you may ask, did my friend throw up? Within those 30 seconds, she got to relive losing one of her friends during the shooting at their high school. And I mean really relive it as the person on screen was killed the exact same way. Even the trailer shows the director/writer blatantly using the deaths of real people who died in school shootings for "inspiration" behind the deaths in the movie (our friends were not bully's. They were victims of a demented mind that wanted attention. Of all the people he killed, not a single one had EVER bullied him.) She didn't finish the trailer and her words were, "The only way I'd watch that movie is if Norman Reedus AND the director watched it with me. That way they could see first hand the effect that it has. Reedus can hold my hair while I puke." I, being the glutton for punishment that I am, did finish the movie. Not without difficulty I assure you. I site all of the above negative reviews as my reasons along with the deep sadness of watching people killed in the same manner as people I knew. I get the feeling that 'fans' of Norman Reedus are the only reason that this movie doesn't have one star. While Mr. Reedus and Mr. Backstrom did OK in their rolls, it just wasn't enough to save the sinking ship that is Hello Herman. If you love Norman Reedus, by all means watch away. Just keep your kids away from this movie. To me it feels more like a blueprint in how to get attention than it does a warning of what could happen. Never. Again.

Set in Any Town, USA, in the near future, sixteen year old Herman Howards takes a bag full of guns and pipe bombs into the school gym, locks the doors and murders 39 fellow students and two teachers. Hello Herman is a fictional account of an all too frequent occurrence in America that aims to explain why such shootings occur so often and who or what is to blame.What Hello Herman actually achieves is to leave the viewer with the sensation of having been bludgeoned with the extreme views from either side. You see, there are only two sides: black and white, left and right, monster and victim. There is no middle ground, no shades of grey. Holding centre court is reformed neo-Nazi Lax Morales (yes, that really is his name and, no, it couldn't be any more obvious if we named a sexy temptress, um, Pussy Galore), played by The Walking Dead's Norman Reedus. Morales now hosts an online talk show and is condemned by rightwing TV journalist Chet Clarkson (Rob Estes) as being a liberal. We know that Morales has reformed because the left-facing swastika tattoo on his chest has been replaced with a tattoo of Jesus Christ. That the new tattoo is smaller than the old one and that there is nary a hint of scar tissue from tattoo removal is never mentioned.Herman sends the video of his massacre to Morales and they begin a series of interviews in the prison as Herman awaits his swift, televised execution. Let's not talk about how he emails Morales the video, bearing in mind he is arrested at the gym, nor why his execution occurs in a matter of months, whereas there are men and women on death row twenty-odd years after conviction due to the appeals process…If we can accept that any reasonable, socialized individual agrees that killing people is wrong own then I won't have people accusing me of being unsympathetic/too sympathetic. This is a review is about a film, not my political views.The 'soft' argument in Hello Herman is hammered home through a series of scenes looking at Herman's life and explanations from children's representative, Lyle Fergusson (John Bobek), who probably wears camel hair boxer shorts and socks with sandals by the way he's been written and performed. We know that Herman is a victim because he's bullied, the teachers don't stand up for him, his parents fought, his dad left, his mum ignores him, his sister died, a girl betrayed him, he plays violent games, Google tells him how to make bombs, supermarkets sell guns… I'm sorry, was that too subtle for you? Would you like me to explain? No, I'll leave that to Herman:Herman: "You know what I miss more than anything?"Morales: "What's that?" Herman: "My Xbox. If I could get one more game in I'd be happy."The 'hard' argument comes from Chet Clarkson and Senator Joan Cox (Christine Dunford), who might just as well have horns and a forked tail. Their view is that Herman is a sick, evil monster and frying him with electricity while strapped to a chair live on TV without even a hood to cover his face is just too damn good for him. At one point, Senator Cox declares, eye's wide and jaw gritted, "Killing people won't stop people killing people. But seeing the execution live sure as hell will!"Again, do you need me to explain that a little better?Hello Herman is one, long, arduous, ineptly made, shockingly acted (Reedus aside) propaganda film that does more damage than good. It is the cinematic equivalent of sprinkling salt on your food with a cement mixer.Hello Herman has a very important message to give. It is a terrible subject matter that must be dealt with but, so far, the American governments over the years have failed to resolve it. That's a given. No problem there.However, Hello Herman is a terrible film. If you wish to know more about the subject of school shootings and teenage angst that leads to extreme acts of violence, walk away from this very quickly and pick up a double bill of Bowling for Columbine and We Need to Talk About Kevin.For more reviews from The Squiss, subscribe to my blog and like the Facebook page.