• Genre: Science Fiction/Conspiracy Theory
• Directed by: Richard Schenkman
• Produced by: Emerson Bixby, Eric D. Wilkinson, Richard Schenkman
• Written by: Jerome Bixby
• Starring: David Lee Smith, John Billingsley, Tony Todd
• Music by: Mark Hinton Stewart
• Distributed by: Anchor Bay Entertainment, Shoreline Entertainment

There are conspiracy movies and then there are conspiracy movies. The Man from Earth is the latter one. The Man from Earth is our first this new series, because this movie is definitely one of the most unique movies to have hit the screens – simply because it never hit the screens. If you are thinking about how we can pick a movie that never hit the theaters in our DVD pick, read on to know more.
The Man from Earth begins like any small budget, little known movie with no big names attached, and quite frankly the production values even makes one think that the movie was planned somewhere in the nineties, but was finally released in the double ohs. But when we go through the story, we are nothing less than flabbergasted at the way the movie just blasts through the various religious information that most of us are told are unshakable truths.
The movie begins with a man calling his friends to his house for a final goodbye, and these friends of him are reputed intellectuals who are quite popular in their fields and professions. One is a doctor, another is a scientist, yet another is just a very knowledgeable one, so on and so forth.  Yet, when they all come together, they are quite surprised when their dear friend tells them that he is an immortal, who has been several people in several lifetimes. He says that he has been most of the religious characters and that he has been through several lifetimes, seen various deaths and massacres, so on and so forth.
For the more inclined, the main character in the movie says that he survived through the Cro Magnon age, and has not aged since the past fourteen thousand years – a claim that many of his intellectual friends find hard to believe, but at the end of it all have no option but to accept what the man says.
Of course, as is wont to happen, his friends do not believe the man in the beginning, and even before believing, they start ridiculing him. It is only later in the day that they begin to believe him and start questioning everything that they have been fed about religion and all the other information that they have about the world.
The movie is our DVD pick because of the audacity of the plot, which is finely balanced, in such a way that at least the lay moviegoer like us did not find any loopholes. This is one of the few movies that not just questions the beliefs of the audience, but also answers them on their behalf, and makes life all the more difficult for the lay believer.

The actors are lesser known, and the direction and even the production values are nothing to speak much of. In fact, the producers of the movie on gone on record saying that they dipped in their own pockets to finance the movie, but the gamble paid off, because most of them got plum posts in some other movies, and well – they made money one way or the other.
The best part of the success of this movie that it did not have a wide release, and is something known as ‘straight-to-video’ movie. The producers of the movie have also said that if all the people who praised the movie would have actually bought the movie, the cost of the movie would have been recovered, and they would be happier.
We still do not know whether they took nameless actors for the movie because they wanted the audience to concentrate on the script, or just because they did not have the money to do so. Whatever be the case, it was interesting to see a movie that did not believe in the ‘superstar-blockbuster’ concept, and made a movie that was intelligent, interesting, and questioned everything that the audience knew ever as the truth.
The movie is also buoyed because of the performance of the main actors. The way they perform their characters are worthy of any of the clump of performance awards that are being given out for the big ticket movies.  The other part that makes the movie a worthwhile watch is the screenplay. Normally, in a big idea concept, the screenplay is not that interesting, and there are also chances that the screenplay may just get lazy and the writer may decide to piggyback on the big ticket concept of the movie, but here, every dialogue, even nuance and every sequence takes the script of the movie ahead, making The Man from Earth one of the best screenplay and editing in recent times.
This is the last work of Jerome Bixby, a well-known and almost revere science fiction writer. He wrote the script with the help of his son on his deathbed, and the script was then given to a director to make on a $200,000 budget.
The movie never made a wide release, but is available via Amazon.