Customer Reviews

Almost Dead [VHS]

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Wow I'm the first person to review Shannen's movie "Almost Dead." And, I feel really honored. Anyhow, this is one of those B-movies that Shannen made in the mid-90's when she was the 90210 -Queen (not to mention the highest paid actress on coast-to-coast TV.) "Almost Dead" (at the time) wasn't a TV movie, it was actually a straight-to-video release. This 1994 movie is based on the book If She Only Knew by Lisa Jackman.

This is the main cast:
Shannen Doherty ~ Dr. Katherine Roshak
William R. Moses ~ Jim Schneider
Costas Mandylor ~ Dominic Delaserra
Steve Inwood ~ The Chief

I enjoy this movie very much because it's rather different from the movies that Shannen is now famous for. Although, I wouldn't necessarily describe "Almost Dead" as a "horror" movie, it certainly is very suspenseful and rather frightening at points. This makes it a very enjoyable film that doesn't fall into that Lifetime Women's Genre too easily.

Shannen plays a psychology professor, Katherine Roshak, who conducts studies on twins. William R. Moses (remember him from Melrose ) plays another psych doctor. He was really great in this movie, and he looked so cute in it (I don't know about you, but I think a man in suspenders is so hot.) But his role was rather small. That was a little disappointing.

As usual Shannen was perfect. She is such an emotional person. I think that's a natural gift that some people have and others simply do not. I did find it rather odd that she was cast as a professor simply because she looked way too young and way too sexy. Oh well, that's why it's a movie.

And, as is par for the course for 99.9% of all Shannen Doherty movies, she is the perpetual victim. In "Almost Dead" she begins to see her deceased mother (hence the title.) And, she looked absolutely repugnant; almost like a mummy. (That's why I was almost conflicted above when I didn't necessarily describe this as "horror.") When Katherine runs to Jim for some answers he convinces her that she's just seeing things.

This is where I got a little perplexed. Was Jim her lover or doctor? Friends with benefits? Who knows because his role was so small and these 2 never even kissed. So it was a little confusing. But, on second thought, perhaps that was the main goal of the writers. Because, for much of the movie I suspected Jim as the one who was stalking Katherine. Was he really?

Anyway, her mother is really starting to terrify her so Katherine goes to the police. Of course the chief dismisses her because as he put it "dead people don't come back." You know, I'm not sure of many things in this life, but I'm certain that you can't raise the dead. Shannen just had such a look of despair on her face in the police station (did I say she always played the perpetual victim.)

All of a sudden the Chief introducers her to Dominic Delaserra (a scary-looking thug) who stares her up and down as if she's a poll-dancer. Suffice it to say, (this man who was just lounging around inside a jail cell because he "likes to") Katherine is rather put off to find out that he's a police officer! He agrees to investigate her claims.

The movie soon goes from odd to sublime. I didn't understand why Katherine got so chummy with Dominic. I suppose to save time, the writers generally do not explain things like this. She's now spending every waking minute with him and she's staying as his creepy friend's apartment.

Needless to say, her mother is still playing tricks on her. The movie ends with a very shocking twist. And everything is explained. I can't say it's unpredictable, but it was fascinating at points because I can't remember seeing a movie like this for a long time.

Almost Dead (Ruben Preuss, 1994)

I've been trying to get my hands on this ever since I read the novel upon which it is based, William Valtos' Resurrection, back in 2002. Given the presence of both Shannen Doherty and a post-Picket Fences Costas Mandylor, I should have known it was a Lifetime Original Movie(TM), and as such, I should have known I shouldn't have bothered. Lifetime has a tendency to take books that range from mediocre (this one) to really, really good (Brooks Stanwood's The Glow is one example) and turn them into awful movies. Is Almost Dead the exception to the rule? Of course it isn't.

Doherty plays Katherine Roshak, a young psychologist whose mother committed suicide four years before the action really gets started (there's a brief opening scene showing the rather spectacular suicide, which involves an exploding motel room). She's been crushed by feelings of guilt ever since, and now she's started seeing her mother. Not visions of her, but in the flesh. Her slick colleague (and maybe boyfriend? Never stated, but obviously an undertone) Jim (Lifetime Original regular William Moses) is convinced it's all about the guilt, but he's not actually seeing the slowly-rotting body. So Roshak heads up to the small town where moms is buried and gets involved with a local rogue cop, Dominic Dellaserra (Mandylor). Dellaserra's not sure what to believe, but when Roshak demands they exhume her mother's corpse, and Dellaserra plays along, they find an empty coffin. Is Roshak's mother truly back form the dead? And what does she want?

Preuss, also a Lifetime Original regular (Deceptions, Blackmail), and screenwriter Miguel Tejada-Flores (who managed one big hit in Revenge of the Nerds, but is now reduced to stuff like Rottweiler) manage to take out everything that was interesting about the book--including, as I alluded to above, the sexual undertones, which I find very odd in a Lifetime Original Move--and replaced it all with a complete and total focus on the supernatural mystery aspect. (Does anyone actually still wonder why foreign films are, as a rule, so much better than ours?) All the characterization is stripped out except that which directly contributes to the plot. Most of the subplots are gone. In short, like most Lifetime Original Movies (and, since the seventies, an increasing amount of Hollywood product), this is a picture painted entirely with primary colors. There is no sense of shading, no perspective, no illusion. Isn't illusion what filmmaking is supposed to be about, at its core? Instead, what we have here is a simple hack job, with not a single thing to distinguish it from a thousand other hack jobs produced in 1994, or any other recent year. (Probably true of the rest of film history as well, but most hack jobs fade into well-deserved obscurity after a not-too-long time.) *