To me, this movie is perfection.

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

A couple of years later, Morris turned in a documentary called 'Vernon, Florida', which was kind of life threatening at first for the director. The town in Florida was known as 'Nub-City', due to the high number of people who would volunteer to cut off their own limbs as a way to collect insurance money. Originally, this was what Morris set 'Vernon, Florida' to be about, but the citizens weren't too happy about it and began to threaten his life and eventually ran him out of town. A little while later, he came back to the town and focused on the many different and eclectic people who lived in this small community. Everyone here as all four limbs now and Morris wants to hear these people's stories and outlook on life in the small swamp town of Vernon. He meets people who think sand grows to a larger size, the pros and cons of turkey hunting, and stories of people with several brains.It's a genuine, funny, yet oddly charming look at life in a small town. Morris really engraved his name in the annals of filmmaking with these two brilliant films and made an impact on the movie industry and his colleagues that would further his career for many years to come.

I collect and watch weird movies. Not just "B" movies, mind you. Those are fun, but most of them have acquired "B" status by merely having been made decades ago with low budgets, compared to today's multi-million dollar blockbusters. But it's the movies that are made with interesting back stories that catch my eye. So it was that while perusing Netflix's recommended movies, that I came across an obscure movie made in 1981 called Vernon, Florida. Now I've seen other documentaries made decades ago about old Florida towns, and having grown up here, I could always relate to the people and places, including the unmistakable wood frame houses surrounded by endless acres of sandy roads, Florida scrub and stands of palmettos. Vernon, Florida looked like such a movie, and with a running time of an hour, I decided to sit down and watch it.Sure enough it showed a small Florida town, located in the panhandle of Florida and included numerous interviews from the people there, where they just rambled about the town, giving anecdotal accounts of things that happened to them in their lives. I instantly related these folks to the countless small town Floridians I had known over the years and with whom I had spent so much time talking and hearing similar stories. The deep southern drawls were quite intelligible since I had grown up here, and I wondered how much trouble others would have understanding. I also wondered how weird the movie would seem to those not from the south. Certainly to them it would be a comedy, but in reality that's the way things were and still are in some places here. But it wasn't until the movie abruptly an hour later that I did a little research and found out the interesting back story to this movie, and to the town known affectionately back then as "Nub City." "Nub City," I thought. That's a strange nick-name. After a little more research, I found out where the name came from. Apparently, during the 1950s and 1960s, the Florida panhandle area accounted for ⅔ of the insurance claims in the whole country for people who had lost limbs and body parts due to accidents, and Vernon, Florida was apparently the epicenter. One insurance agent's list of clients included the following: a man who sawed off his left hand at work, a man who shot off his foot while protecting chickens, a man who lost his hand while trying to shoot a hawk, a man who somehow lost two limbs in an accident involving a rifle and a tractor, and a man who bought a policy and then, less than 12 hours later, shot off his foot while aiming at a squirrel. Nearly 50 men in Vernon and surrounding areas collected insurance for these "accidents" and none were ever convicted of fraud. An insurance investigator later reported, "to sit in your car on a sweltering summer evening on the main street of Nub City, watching anywhere from eight to a dozen cripples walking along the street, gives the place a ghoulish, eerie atmosphere." Suddenly, it made sense. This is what director, Errol Morris intended to do a documentary on when he rolled into town in 1981. The problem was that his subjects threatened to murder him if he reported their secret. So in response, he retooled his film to be merely a documentary full of interviews of local residents.Today, Vernon, like many of Florida's small towns, is facing the challenges of growth and urban sprawl. It's main street has been widened into a four-lane road and many of its historic buildings have been demolished. Most of those with peg legs or claw hands are gone as well, as commercial chains worm their way in, transforming Vernon into the stereotypical "Anytown, USA" that is so prevalent across our country today. But alas, thanks to the contributions of directors who seek out the weird, and those subjects who are happy to share their stories, at least one more small town is recorded on film for history to remember her by. If you have a Netflix account, you can either get the DVD or watch it instantly. Knowing the back story, it will be much more interesting, I promise you!

It's strange to see an Errol Morris film that works and doesn't work all the same. The film is short, maybe too short, and doesn't really take much time to going into much of what the town of Vernon is about, or if these interviewed are its only residents. There's no unifying theme though to the work, which is the basic problem, as Morris at his best (Thin Blue Line with the stylization and depth of reasonable doubt in true crime; Gates of Heaven with loss of life as a means to understand what human nature is all about; Fog of War about knowing limitations and understanding mistakes made in history; Fast Cheap & Out of Control with the process and joys of a job well done), as it's simply a series of interviews with the residents. Maybe, as one person here pointed out, it's that everyone has a story. But, not to be modest, you sometimes can't understand what these people are saying anyway in their storytelling.But at the same time, as Morris just goes about with his very unobtrusive and expert eye for human detail (the detail, anyway, of people at their goofiest and more sincere), it's very funny to see these backwoods folk and old guys tell their everyday stories and tales of hunting turkey and other animals. Favorite scenes would include: the preacher, who is part-time a laborer and part-time an obsessive word nut, specifically the word 'therefore' as it appears in the bible and what it means; the guy with his pet tortoise, who he tries to get to move around by gentle kicks, and also with his wild possum; the simple coot who's got one tooth and plenty of pictures of possible life elsewhere with clouds and stars in the sky. Morris doesn't shy away from these idiosyncrasies that one can find right away in the not-quite-Deliverance parts of the deep south, and watching the film with an audience is an added treat, to see who may laugh at who doing what.At the end, there aren't really any big ideas to take away from the film, at least on a first viewing, and it may be a little repetitive for some- or maybe not, as it may hit so close to home that it's a likely candidate for best documentary about a town with population 40. It's a little quirk of a doc-comedy that's worth it for Morris fans, but far from being any kind of masterpiece.

This is a surprise, a documentary about weird, old people in Florida that manages to be both amusing and insightful. The film is very simply a collection of anecdotes from Vernon's eccentric elderly residents about their hobbies and in the case of the bored policeman, his job.Errol Morris, surely one of the best documentary filmmakers of recent times, wisely chooses to let his subjects do the talking. There is no Michael Moore grandstanding and no pompous voice-over. The result is refreshing as it allows the viewer to come to their own conclusion about the interviewees without having someone's personal agenda shoved down your throat. Personally, I think these old coots are awesome. They have all found different ways to bring happiness and meaning to their twilight years, whether it be shooting turkeys, farming worms or looking after stray animals. While the gobbler hunter provides most of the laughs with his amazing anecdotes and wall of turkey feet, the highlight for me was the priest and his sermon.Vernon, Florida is a beautifully filmed documentary that stands up incredibly well 25 years after it was made. This is highly recommended.