Preview Mode Links will not work in preview mode

Jun 4, 2023

 

Subscribe today for access to our full catalog of bonus episodes, including 2+ new episodes every month!

www.patreon.com/boysbiblestudy

Stephen Groo is a remarkable artist — an “outsider” filmmaker who boasts over 200 completed films in his catalog. His work was the subject of the 2018 documentary THE INSUFFERABLE GROO, which features Jack Black acting in one of Groo’s films. It was the first time a mainstream Hollywood actor had ever engaged with Groo’s work, and marked a milestone in a prolific career that until that point was largely obscure and ignored by the film world. Groo’s filmography is a bizarre mix of original stories and unauthorized adaptations of existing intellectual properties. BATMAN, TOMB RAIDER, and even YU-GI-OH are some of the media properties that Groo has incorporated into his cinematic universe. With such a huge array of films to explore, we at Boys’ Bible Study were pretty overwhelmed to embark on the journey of getting to know this unique filmmaker. Then, our friend Wormy recommended we start with CHALLENGE OF FAITH, a distinctly Christian offering from Groo featuring an original script about the moral dangers of ignoring your faith and family to try to succeed in business. Groo writes, directs, and stars in this picture as Jason Quinn, a humble desk clerk at an unnamed company who gets the opportunity of a lifetime when he is mysteriously promoted all the way up to be the new company president. He’s thrilled at first to create a more comfortable lifestyle for he and his wife, but when a mysterious goth stranger starts poking around the office, Jason starts to wonder if this new success was actually the bait to a spiritual trap laid by the devil himself. CHALLENGE OF FAITH is a delightful and relatively sophisticated “outsider” film, tightly constructed but with that homemade, mid-aughts, shot-on-digital campiness that we here at BBS love to see in a film. Add an encounter with a powerful angel, and a spirit quest back in time to the Garden of Eden, and it became immediately clear to us that CHALLENGE OF FAITH had firmly immortalized Stephen Groo as one of our favorite filmmakers.

View our full episode list and subscribe to any of our public feeds: http://boysbiblestudy.com

Unlock 2+ bonus episodes per month: http://patreon.com/boysbiblestudy

Subscribe to our Twitch for monthly streams: http://twitch.tv/boysbiblestudy

Follow us on Instagram: http://instagram.com/boysbiblestudy

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/boysbiblestudy