Gardens of the Night (2008)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Damian Harris directs/writes this sad and eye opening drama. At the age of eight, Leslie Whitehead(Ryan Simpkins)is kidnapped by a scheming man named Alex(Tom Arnold)and his young partner Frank(Kevin Zegers). Alex will tell the girl that her parents no longer want her and can have a better life without her. She and another victim named Donnie(Jermaine Scooter Smith)are forced into child prostitution and pornography. The two will try to cope by pretending they are in an imaginary world based on The Jungle Book. After about nine years of horror the two are dumped on the streets. Now Leslie(Gillian Jacobs)and Donnie(Evan Ross) have only each other to depend on. They will survive the streets the best they know how...prostitution. Thanks to a shelter counselor(John Malkovich), Leslie tries to return to her parents. But will this be a success? The teen will wonder if Donnie just disappeared or met mishap. Haunting, sad and disgraceful. The Harris bases GARDEN of the NIGHT on two years of personal research. Arnold is outstanding in the role. Also in the cast: Harold Perrineau, Jeremy Sisto and Landall Goolsby.

It is difficult to make a movie about childhood abductions. You can't risk traumatising the child actors. You dare not make it so realistic that you are accused of producing porn for sexual predators that encourages them to crime. What actor wants a role more stigmatising than Norman Bates? apparently Tom Arnold.This movie tackles the problem by showing a series of events perhaps 1% as traumatic as a real abduction, letting you fill in the other possibilities with your imagination. They chose a child actor for the abducted child, Leslie, who had no skill at acting at all. She is not in the least convincing, which makes her performance unreal, sort of a Kabuki telling of a story rather than a realistic re-enacting of events.Certain things made no sense. Young Leslie is hopelessly naive. No child of her age could be that unaware of the dangers of interacting with strangers. The abductors do a dry run and release Leslie to identify them. That makes absolutely no sense.Later we see Leslie as a teen. She smokes. She is addicted to cocaine. She is a hooker and a pimp. She treats her friends with contempt. She lives in squalor. She has a general screw-you to everyone and everything. The only bright spot in her life is a boy, Donny, who was abducted around the same time she was who has maintained his devotion to her, even though she spits on him.A counselor (John Malkovich) figures out who she is and arranges a visit home to be reunited with her parents. The family is like the Ward and June Cleavers. She feels too soiled to fit in and leaves in the middle of the night without leaving word. And the movie ended.I could not decipher what she planned to do next -- try to find her boyfriend, take up hooking again, something else? I did not really care. She had become such a selfish monster.You saw no transition from the lamb-like abducted child to the hard- boiled hooker. They seemed two completely unrelated people. If someone were to make another film with a similar theme, they should fill in some of the transition.Though he gets top billing, Malkovich has only a bit part, most of which he spends reading forms aloud.

There are a few film efforts I've seen that hurt me so badly that they diminished my ability to feel peace of mind or happiness. Oz season 4, Megan is Missing, The Killing Gene, and this movie. This movie hurt me more than any of those. Years after seeing it, I still have nightmares about it.I can not complain about anything in this movie on a cinematic level. It is very well filmed and directed. It is very well acted. The story is mercilessly realistic and honest. It is a noble, worthwhile effort to have made this film.The conundrum is that there is not one person I can think of whom I would put through the pain of watching this. Anyone who could watch this movie and not be injured by it is just closed off to its realism.The life that is evoked by this film is that of people who have had everything taken away from them. That things like this actually happen is too much to bear.

This is a good movie. In fact, it's an exceptionally well done movie that tackles an impossibly difficult and even horrific subject and that, as a result, makes it often a very difficult movie to watch. It's not a sob-story happy ending kind of movie, either, so by the time it comes to an end you don't really feel at all uplifted. In fact, you feel kind of worn down, upset - even angry.The subject of the movie is child sexual exploitation. A darker, seedier and more disturbing storyline probably doesn't exist. It revolves around Leslie (played by Ryan Simpkins as a young child and Gillian Jacobs as a teen.) Leslie is kidnapped at the age of 8 and essentially forced into a life of child prostitution. Thankfully, nothing graphic is shown (obviously nothing sexual, and no physical abuse of any kind, really), but just knowing the situation makes your heart bleed for this girl and at times ties your stomach in knots.The kidnapper is played by Tom Arnold. The portrayal of a sick man luring his victim into his clutches and gradually making her more and more dependent on him to the point at which he can take her out in public and she won't try to escape or tell anyone what's going on is truly disturbing. There's no real closure with Arnold's character of Alex, either. Somehow Leslie and her friend Donnie (who was held captive as well) are just all of a sudden on their own. There's no mention of how they got away, or of what happened to Alex.One piece of advice: this seems to me to be a pretty accurate depiction (a psychological one mostly) of children being kidnapped and then sexually exploited. It's filmed mostly from Leslie's point of view, so it is a hard movie, and if you watch a tough movie expecting (and even needing) everything to work out in the end and everybody to live happily ever after then don't watch this. It's not a fairy tale. Not in any way, shape or form. It's dark and disturbing from the first to the last moment. But if you can get through that, it's also a very powerful and well made movie. (8/10)