Michael Ledo Herman Howards (Garrett Backstrom) is the bullied kid at school. He likes to play violent video games and download pipe bomb plans off the Internet. He snaps killing 39 students and two teachers. Blogger Lax Morales (Norman Reedus) is requested by Herman to interview him. Lax has a complex past that plays out as a subplot.The film was decently acted and the violent parts are not shown. It had your basic Star Trek theme...the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one in the Reedus subplot and in the main plot, the emotional needs of the one outweighs the lives of the many. Herman himself hit upon all the stereotypes of our view of a troubled teen terrorist.Guide: No sex or nudity.

RepublicofE The two leads of this film do an adequate to excellent job all things considered. But that's really about the nicest thing I can say about this movie.The makers of this film either were trying to make a piece of blatant propaganda or were sincerely interested in giving a dynamic presentation of a complex issue but fell flat on their face. I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt and hope it was the latter. I will say this, the makers do seem to have an at least slightly more lucid understanding of the issue of school shootings than say, Michael Moore, or a lot of other mainstream Hollywood personalities do. For example, "I shot as many people as I did because I had to reset the precedent" is exactly the kind of thing a school mass shooter would say, maybe not after being arrested but before in his journals and "confession" tapes. They were able to recognize and convey the idea that infamy is at least almost as big a motive for people like Herman as "revenge" and that there is more too it than just "wahaha I was bullied so now I'm gonna show everyone by shooting up my school".The problem is, that little bit of remarkable perceptiveness and insight is completely balanced out by asinine and simplistic messages about other aspects of school shootings. Anyone who has researched the issue even a little in depth knows that the majority of school shooters are not really severely bullied and the ones that clear whole classrooms are especially unlikely to have been severely hazed, in fact they are often bullies themselves. This is not to say that it was "wrong" per se for them to portray Herman as having been a victim of hazing and cyberbullying, the filmmakers are not obligated to make him exactly like other school shooters and should be free to form their own interpretive framework, but they just really hammered it home too hard. Degrassi can be somewhat excused for their overly simplistic interpretation of the relationship between hazing and school shootings because they made that episode at a time when the narrative that the CHS shooters were just two bullied teens driven to the edge by extreme hazing was still the most widely accepted theory, but that notion has long since been debunked, and in 2012-2015 we should know better. I've seen a couple people ask why they chose to cast a pretty boy as the shooter. Well to be honest that was one of their better decisions, because the students who do this kind of thing really are often pretty boys, not acne-ridden overweight outcasts. I mean obviously it's true that a pretty boy can be a bullying victim as much as anyone else, but the narrative that the skinny emo kid that no one talks to is the most likely to attempt an act like this is a disingenuous and frankly dangerous one. Being antisocial does not automatically rank you at the bottom of the food chain.Every other aspect of the film is a jumbled mess. It seems like in an attempt to frame a dynamic "discussion" about school shootings they decided to try and shoe-horn in as many related topics as possible, but as a result they ended up taking the most juvenile and superficial approach to each one. There's that one political show that serves as an obvious and obnoxious allegory for Fox right-wing talk shows, which is really no more subtle than an SNL sketch about the same subject. There's a Michelle Bachman-like Republican legislator (they just couldn't resist including her party affiliation for the record) who I guess is supposed to p#ss us off with how b#tchy and unsympathetic to Herman she is except the film never really gives us any reason for us to fell all that sorry for him either. Then, as if in an attempt to make it more fair to conservatives, they have some liberal d##s##t commentator who is also presented as being just as much of a moron, along with his "killing people won't stop people from killing people" followers. Maybe the message was "hey look, talking heads who get involved in school shooting stories are nothing more than opportunistic bloodsuckers no matter which end of the political spectrum they hail from", but I doubt it.There's also some peripheral expository arch about Herman's sister having been killed by a car a couple years before the shooting, complete with way over-the-top sequences of him being haunted by her. The best I can tell is that since he felt it was his fault, that feeling of already having blood on his hands made him less apprehensive about the massacre, but they never really explain it in so much detail. There's also a side-story about Lax Morales's having rolled with a quasi-neonazi underground group during the days of his youth and possibly having been implicated as an accessory in the manslaughter death of a black teenager. The relevance this has to the rest of the movie is never flushed out; they clearly thought it was contributing to some kind of "hate breeds hate, violence breeds violence" message which I suppose could have worked but didn't.For people familiar with school shooting movies, "Zero Day" is usually the gold-standard. Now I don't think this film should have been "like Zero Day" and for the record I think some of the things they did were pretty clever. But watching Zero Day can help make clear some of the things that this film unquestionably did wrong.

C.H Newell I was hoping this film might add something to the debate about school shootings in America, but unfortunately it does not. The story of Herman Howards, a bullied and ridiculed young kid in high school, who decides to finally show people what they're doing to him: he walks into his school, laying waste to many students and teachers with guns and pipe bombs. Herman is familiar; he's like all the real school shooters who ended up taking lives needlessly because they were traumatized personally. I have sympathy for those who are bullied- I was in juniour high school, and it was awful. However, there's a difference between having sympathy and agreeing with what someone has done. School shootings have a lot of angles to consider- one major angle being the availability of guns to people, and particular young people, in the U.S- but this film goes in too many directions, never really going for one angle instead of a bunch.The acting was all right. Mainly Norman Reedus carried the acting here. Even the kid who played Herman wasn't that great, though there were a few moments I enjoyed from him. Unfortunately acting can't make up for the lack of a decent plot. It's too simple. They're not really saying anything here. I gave this a 4 out of 10 because of Reedus, and also the willingness to tackle a really tough subject for American audiences. Other than that, I would say skip it. I was waiting on this awhile, but now I'm thoroughly disappointed.The one thing that I did enjoy here Reedus' character, and his backstory. He was involved with some undercover reporting, a la Hunter S Thompson with the Hells Angels, which of course eventually goes bad. Basically we get more depth into the character, how he has not always necessarily been an "innocent", and took part in something brutal. Though this is another area the film also falls short- they never really gave me a satisfying conclusion to the character and his demons. It was a very intense setup, but I don't feel like they paid it off in the end.Find something else to watch, unless you have some time to waste. There are a couple other films involving school shootings, particularly Zero Day, that use the premise more effectively, and with much more impact.

Ting Zhang This was my 2nd time watching "Hello Herman" and compared to all those entertaining blockbusters, I'm glad to see a movie like this being made. It proves to be educational and gives us a profound reflection. Through Herman, I can see the bullying victims' situation and feel sorry for them. Those kids shouldn't be treated like that and Herman made it known that we're the same; human beings need to be treated the same and need love. I feel sorry for those kids and wish they could stand up for themselves. This movie draws our attention to those troubled kids at school, and makes us think about what contributes to those kids' actions and what we can do to help them. As for Herman, I feel sorry that he is always being picked on and bullied by other students, which makes his insanity more understandable. However, I'm angry that he doesn't know how to stand up for himself. He allows himself to become addicted to games and doesn't even know what to do when his sister gets an accident.Sometimes people blame the family or the mother for being too busy. I always doubt that and think it's an excuse for not being responsible for themselves. There are divorced families everywhere and parents need to make a living for the family. Kids from those families should be more responsible and act like an adult. Our society does need to pay attention to those kids, help them understand their situation, and lead them to the right direction. Maybe Herman will get society's attention now and make our society take actions to prevent more tragedies.