When I read the reader reviews of "Noah's Ark" by Susan and Issachar and the At-A-Glance Film Review by Sam, I thought, "How did the filmmakers mess it up that badly?" The source text is widely available. Yet, somehow, it apparently hasn't touched one of these filmmakers' hands in years, except perhaps to round-file it.

Well, I'll say this for them: they're honest about their travesty. At the beginning, they state that poetic license was taken with the story "for dramatic effect." As it turns out, it makes the poetic license taken in "The Ten Commandments" look like a documentary by comparison.

For brevity, I'm leaving out everything in the aforementioned reviews.

Examples of poetic license:

- The LORD asks Noah to find the 50 righteous, but Noah skips straight to 10.

- Pardon me, but The LORD closed the door, not Noah's sons.

- Noah's sons left immediately after? Then the thing with Noah getting drunk could not have happened.

Then, of course, there are the great lines, such as:

- Noah: "It's over." Lot: "But who won?" Micah: "Who lost?"

- Micah: "I'm done for, Noah. It's death and darkness for me. Throw me into the nearest cesspit."

(after the war is over)

Micah: "Death go thy ways! I've years of life ahead of me!"

- Lot: "I'm going! His wife: But... but... I wish you were gone!"

- The merchant took the destruction as proof that it doesn't pay to mess with religions. (Not thinking that if Noah and family hadn't paid attention, they would've been destroyed, as well.)

- Noah's wife: "It takes a bit of time for The LORD to get to know you, to see if you're sincere."

- Lot: "I'd worship Him, too, if He wasn't so strict on rules and regulations."

- Noah's wife: "I think 'cast off' is the expression, Noah." (Never mind that that expression hadn't been coined yet.)

The special effects:

- As soon as Lot's wife turned around, one of the fireballs did a 180 and smacked into a nearby rock, and the fire toasted her almost instantly. Of course, The LORD had to redirect a fireball that had passed them, as He obviously could not have sent one aimed at her to hit her at the point of turning.

Question: How do three tan-skinned boys become light-skinned? And how does a dark-haired boy get red hair?

Rating: 0-1 turkeys if you can't stand the level of tampering with the Word done by this movie, or even if you don't believe the Bible is God's Word but are convinced that if you're going to make a movie about an existing piece of literature, you should at least follow it closely as possible; 4-5 if you can laugh at this sort of thing.

Scenes to watch for: The bald guy getting burned with water; whispering in the mouth; the temple roof flying off; the peddler on a pedal-powered boat.