Lately, in the movie industry, we’ve seen more sequels and spiritual successors to movies that were viral box-office hits. Films nowadays have become stale, and most comedy seems forced rather than coming naturally. Take Marvel, for example, the fandom itself makes fun of how forced a lot of the humor feels; take the quote, “he’s right behind me, isn’t he?” for example. These lines are so clearly forced in an attempt to get a laugh from the audience, and not to mention that they’re so very lazily written that now any attempt to create humor in a film that doesn’t need it just feels so odd and out of place. However, not all movies need to have the same comedic feeling, and comedy reached a flowstate culminating in a cinematic masterpiece released in 2017.
One night while trying to do anything but schoolwork, I decided to browse the streaming service where all the creme de la creme films go: Tubi. One film in particular piqued my interest just from the title alone, The VelociPastor. “Huh,” I thought to myself, “this is probably just an average slop movie,” and oh boy, could I have not been more wrong.
The film opens on Pastor Doug Jones, played by Gregory James Cohan, doing pastor-y things when he sees his parents outside the church standing by their car, and the film does an expert cut to Pastor Doug being blown back by what we could presume to be an explosion, and then it cuts to his parents’ car, the source of the explosion. Pastor Doug decides to do what anyone would do after watching his parents die in an explosion: go to China. Just from the opening of the film, I could tell that this was going to be the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
I could tell that I was going to love this movie without even having to watch the rest of it, since it was unlike anything that I had seen before. As a superhero movie connoisseur myself, I’ve also been feeling the sort of superhero fatigue when it comes to how practically every movie is written the same way.
The VelociPastor is written in such a way that practically anything you could’ve guessed about the plot is going to be completely wrong. “Oh, a film called VelociPastor? The main villain must be some sort of T-Rex guy, right?” Wrong. The primary villains of the film are actually a group of Christian ninjas who wish to sell highly addictive cocaine in order to expand their drug empire, which just goes to show the absolute absurdity of the film.
The entire movie is produced in a way that can be sort of what some may call “unprofessional”, with some clips being clearly shot by a shaky camera or clips of audio coming out sounding rather grainy, but that only adds to the human touch of the movie. At no point does this movie feel like it’s just slogging along and following its written plot for just the sake of moving the film along; there’s just always something happening, and it’s always for a reason.
This was easily my most favorite movie that I had watched in 2025, not for the reason that it had some sort of outstanding and out of the world plot, but simply for the matter of fact that there’s clearly passion put into this project. There’s something about the human touch that makes this movie a masterpiece in my eyes.
Movies like this – low-budget pieces known as B movies– should be praised more for their creativity and love put into the film, given what they were able to work with. With the internet now constantly churning out very clear slop with no effort put into it, it’s refreshing to watch something that may not be perfect, but instead has passion put into it.
So go ahead and take a risk on that movie you’re not too sure about. Who knows, it could be a diamond in the rough, rivaling The VelociPastor itself. Overall, on the Luis Diaz movie rating scale, I’d give this a very solid 5 out of 5 stars, and I’d totally recommend you watch it as well.
