Flooding With Love for the Kid (2007, Zachary Oberzan) (Patreon)

45/100

Comparing this $95.51 labor of love (budget's revealed at the end; I assume most of the money was spent on costume rentals) to Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation isn't entirely fair—those kids remade an existing movie, shot for shot, whereas Oberzan pays zero attention to Kotcheff's First Blood and its multitude of divergences from the source novel. This is an entirely separate and considerably more faithful literary adaptation, not a crudely exacting cinematic homage. Still, the insanely elaborate, gleefully amateurish, literally homemade movie, as a "genre," can't help but be far more charming when executed by teenagers, rather than being the obsessive work of a fully-grown-ass man. After revisiting the '82 film (needlessly, as it turns out), I wondered aloud how Oberzan could possibly enact Rambo in the woods without essentially creating an extended version of Vincent Gallo's absurdist North by Northwest talent-show act in Arizona Dream, yet was still unprepared for the sight of several poorly composited Oberzans running in place (or crawling in place—he performs the search dogs, too) against a fast-moving projected background of trees. It's all very silly, though I did frequently enjoy the movie's cash-strapped ingenuity: Oberzan hilariously fashions a helicopter by setting a box fan horizontally atop two folding chairs, its motor spinning a makeshift propeller, and I laughed when he enacts the cave-in by just stepping into a closet and slowly closing the door behind him, with sound effects accomplishing the rest. 

Despite such tongue-in-cheek flourishes, however, Flooding With Love clearly isn't intended as a goof, and we're rarely invited to laugh at it. The film is closer in spirit to Max Fischer's Vietnam play, Heaven & Hell, in all its naïve, awkward sincerity. Which, again, feels different coming from a guy who I believe was at least 30 when he knocked himself out doing justice to every aspect of Morrell's vision, including e.g. Sheriff Teasle's marriage gradually falling apart by long-distance telephone even as he does battle with Rambo (a subplot completely omitted by the Stallone version, though its initial assembly ran more than three hours so maybe Kotcheff shot that material and then cut it). For rabid fans, Oberzan's sheer commitment is sufficient—they're in awe of the film's very existence. I, on the other hand, could not entirely get past the fact that he's mostly a terrible actor. His Rambo, in particular, stinks on ice even if you banish all memory of Stallone and bear in mind that everyone calls this former Green Beret "the kid"; early scenes (likewise absent from the ’82 film) in which Rambo deliberately needles authority figures lack any sense of hostility or even self-amusement, making the character come across like a nervous linguistics major employing comedy as a defense mechanism. Only Teasle has any genuine force of personality here, which wouldn't be an issue were Oberzan not evidently working overtime to convey the story's emotional force. Maybe it didn't help that I was heavily into high-school forensics and watched dozens if not hundreds of D.I. (Dramatic Interpretation) rounds, as that event likewise features one person performing every role, albeit without props of any kind. Oberzan would never have "broken to octos" (speech/debate's equivalent of making the playoffs). So while I can appreciate Flooding With Love as a singular achievement, my admiration goes only so far. After half an hour—please note that this film is 14 minutes longer than First Blood (and I frankly wish Oberzan had followed the latter in ditching Teasle's psychic link with Rambo, which is just plain dumb)—I'd pretty much gotten the gist, and was reduced to chuckling at a raging river being evoked by the kitchen sink's cold-water tap.