Customer Reviews

Black Day Blue Night [VHS]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read years ago that cute Mia Sara is nude in this movie, so I looked for it for years. At last, I found it at Amazon.com. The story is interesting, and having Mia Sara nude adds much to the pleasure of seeing it. I am indeed glad I found it at long last.

The story line for Black Day Blue Night is as creative and entertaining as any out there, the casting was excellent and a young Mia Sara didn't get nearly enough opportunties and exposure in that LA industry!

I really enjoyed this movie. It's not a great action or suspense film, but not a bad little movie to watch on a Friday or Saturday night if you are looking to just kick back and enjoy a flick. I only wish it was available on DVD. I will plan on purchasing it if it's released, for now I bought the VHS version, which was failry decent quality, but on an HDTV greater than 32 inches all VHS' have a hard time keeping up with today's video quality. The movie starts out with Mia Sara catching her husband cheating on her and eventaully hitches a ride with the other woman. Along the way they pick up a hitch hiker who they later believe to have robbed an armored truck. The law is looking for him and eventually catches up with them all, but there are some unexpected twists. Pretty decent acting and Mia Sara's nice long nude scenes are a plus for any man looking too see her breasts. Enjoy.

A tarantula crawls across a desolate road. An unmarked police cruiser speeds through the desert. When the two travelers finally intersect, the Chevrolet's draft flips the arachnid. The spider rights itself and continues its journey.

This opening scene from "Black Day Blue Night" mirrors the movie's plot. Writer/director J. S. Cardone puts three characters into purposeful motion. Halfway through the film, an unexpected--and, unfortunately, unmotivated--"flip" occurs. Like the tarantula, the surviving characters get up and continue on their way, but viewers should expect to feel less invested in the outcome. Recovering from the tumble--and trusting the storyteller again--will prove difficult.

The first character we meet is Rinda Woolley (Michelle Forbes), a young woman with impulse control issues. What is good in the moment is what Rinda pursues, whether it is Barbie blond hair with a drugstore bottle of dye (which makes her dark coif orange), passionate sex with a man she hardly knows (whose wife shoots her way through the motel room door), or quitting her job in a rage (and without a polite two week's notice). Rinda interjects profanity and physical punctuation into every impulsive action, like unleashing fry-cook fu on the patrons and their vehicles as she departs Hop Chung's Cafe.

When Hallie Schrag (Mia Sara), the betrayed wife, asks for a ride, Rinda agrees, perhaps to atone for her contribution to the adultery. With no good music on the radio, Rinda turns to Hallie for conversation and learns that her companion is both an orphan and a victim of domestic abuse. We have our doubts, for Hallie's face does not have the wear acquired from watching a mother drink herself to death, and her body (which we will soon see in all its glory) has not a single mark on it.

When a thunderstorm strands Rinda's ancient Cadillac in the mud, the women encounter Dodge (Gil Bellows), a drifter hugging a mysterious suitcase. Impulsive Rinda invites him along, and the three decide to detour to a spring-fed canyon where they swim, drink, and swap stories about their disappointing childhoods. When Dodge chooses Hallie for sex--perhaps because she bares all in an artless presentation of female breasts--Rinda continues to California alone.

Interrupting Rinda's drive west is Lt. John Quinn (J. T. Walsh). Quinn is a lone-wolf Provo detective investigating the robbery of an armored car and murder of one of its guards. Two suspects died when their getaway car hit a cow, but the third is still loose with one million dollars in his possession. When Quinn discovers Rinda used a marked $20 bill to buy gas and was traveling with a hitchhiker, he offers a $10,000 reward for Dodge's whereabouts. The huge sum seduces Rinda, who leads Quinn back to the canyon.

Once there, without any motivation or explanatory back story, Quinn kills Rinda and a fellow law enforcement officer, reveals that he is the third robber in the heist, and demands his money, convinced that Dodge must have happened upon the accident scene and "stolen" it. As Quinn tries to get Dodge to reveal the money's location (it's not, alas, in the mysterious suitcase), Hallie admits that she has the cash and shoots Quinn dead. The tumble has occurred.

Quinn is not the real villain of this movie--the bad writing is. If Cardone wanted this film to become a low-budget gem for audiences to discover and love, then he needed to give the story, not Sara's breasts, more attention. Logic leaks from big holes in the plot, each of which Cardone could have plugged with a line or two of dialogue.

For example, Rinda needs a compelling reason to betray Dodge for the reward money. She already had a chance to turn him over to law enforcement when, at a gas station, a sheriff was inquiring about hitchhikers, but she protected Dodge by pretending to be his wife.

The plug for this hole is easy. During their get-acquainted conversation, Hallie should have asked Rinda, "So what's in San Diego?" Rinda could have answered, "A woman whose tastes I couldn't afford." Making Rinda bisexual would fit her look: sexy, straight redneck from the waist down with the bare legs and cowboy boots, and cute lesbian butch from the waist up with the plaid flannel shirt and short hair. She would then have a good reason for wanting the money, and bisexuality would give the scenes in the canyon much more tension as Rinda competed not only with Hallie for Dodge but also with Dodge for Hallie. With just her acrobatic eyes, Forbes could have had Rinda roll from interest in the boy one moment to the girl the next.

The second problem is that Hallie has not a mark on her despite her husband's beatings and surviving a car wreck that left two people, a cow, and a vehicle broken and bloody. Again, the fix is easy. At some point, Hallie should have disrobed enough for Rinda to notice bruises. That's when Hallie should have asked, "Did he hit you too?" Blaming the bruises on an abusive husband (when she really acquired them from the accident) would have made a nice feint. A seat belt across her torso during the accident flashback would explain why she wasn't thrown from the vehicle as were the other two occupants.

The biggest hole is that Quinn has no motivation to rob an armored car and murder a guard. His boss does worry that he's "gone squirrely" but offers no explanation for the comment. If the chief had just added, "He hasn't been the same since Louise started chemo. I sure wish insurance would pay for that experimental treatment," then we could understand why a good cop had gone bad.

Just as the tarantula crosses more quickly after its tumble in the Chevrolet's wake, we want the end to hurry up and arrive before we get flattened by another big inconsistency racing our way, Cardone at the wheel.

This film had more potential than it ultimately delivered. A woman's husband is cheating on her which she interrupts only to befriend the lover. The two women then seek to leave smalltown Hanksville, Utah only to become embroiled in an armored car robbery. They pick up a hitchhiker who is eventually identified as a possible suspect in the armored car robbery. The plot thickens when the investigating policeman is shown to be the actual missing suspect. Several people are killed but the woman and the hitchhiker escape a rather implausible situation at a desert oasis. They return to town to find the money that was actually obtained by the woman whose husband had cheated at the film's beginning. The movie ends when the cheating husband returns to find wife and her suitcase full of money. They are both killed by a train and hitchhiker guy is the only survivor. He walks away from the scattered money grieving his lost love.

This movie has many plot twists, but nothing really ties it all together so it makes sense at the end. Why did cheating husband return? For that matter, how did wife and hitchiker drive a police vehicle and not be discovered? Why did the train kill the hsband and wife at the end? None of these questions gets an adequate answer. How did husband discover the wife in the hotel?

These questions make this an exciting, but pointless movie. I had never heard of it before and probably for good reason. No top billing actors appear in it, though the movie isn't written for a high impact actor anyway. It has entertainment value, but little else.

The concept for the plot is not new, but could be interesting to watch if done correctly. Unfortunately, the acting on all fronts was sub-par. Mia Sara had the same facial expression throughtout the entire film. I saw no "mystery" in this film; it was predictable with no surprises. This is separate and distinct from the actor's performances, which as I said above, was sub-par. This is not the sort of movie one would watch more than once, except, of course, if your interest is in seeing Mia Sara naked.