A Wicked Spoof of Fundamentalist Faith

In Saved! it's all Jesus all the time at American Eagle Christian High School, where one girl announces, "I think Jesus appeared to me in my fish tank last night" and Pastor Skip, the principal, leads the chant "Jesus rules!" at the school assembly.

But there's trouble in this little bit of paradise in suburban Maryland, what with a character named Mary hoping for a virgin birth, her boyfriend sent off to a Christian center to cure his homosexuality and everyone trying to save Cassandra Edelstein, the school's bad girl and lone Jew, from eternal damnation. Over this troubled scene looms a 20-foot-tall wooden cutout of Jesus, to whom just about everyone prays, but who answers their prayers in the most mysterious ways.

Writer-director Brian Dannelly's Saved! (co-written with Michael Urban) is an often hilarious coming-of-age tale that sets out to spoof the Christian Right and the cruel horrors of high school and succeeds most of the time.

"I've been born again my whole life," says Mary (Jena Malone) at the start of Saved! Mary believes she has received a message from Jesus in her swimming pool to save her boyfriend Dean (Chad Faust) from his gayness by showing him the joys of heterosexuality. The maneuver doesn't work too well on Dean, who is quickly sent packing to a Christian center that promises to cure everything from alcoholism to homosexuality. And it leaves Mary's faith in God shaken when her prayers aren't answered in the way she had dreamed, finding herself knocking one day on the offices of Planned Parenthood.

Well, maybe that's not so bad at first glance. When Cassandra (Eva Amurri) slyly tells her new wheelchair-bound beau Roland (Macaulay Culkin) that "there's only one reason for a Christian girl to go to Planned Parenthood," he replies, "To plant a pipe bomb?"

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