Customer Reviews

On the Borderline

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Low budget direct-to-DVD turkey that asks the question: "If you can't afford to pay for a professionally written screenplay, why are you wasting money producing something like this?".

Screenplays don't get anymore ordinary or unoriginal than this one and if you start from this far behind in pre-production; no amount or energy, talent, and money in production and post-production will be able to save the day. Of course "On the Borderline" (2001) is not exactly awash in energy, talent or money so I suppose there is a certain unity of utter mediocrity attained.

For director Michael Oblowitz to live up to his surname, it would be necessary for him to be involved in something that had a chance but somehow fell short. A chance is something this poor thing never had. Oblowitz is not really a mainstream director although he has done a couple C-Grade action films. A quick glance at his body of work reveals nothing to indicate the skill set needed to perform acting for the camera direction. The uneven and disjointed performances here (i.e. when multiple cast members share a scene their intensity levels rarely match) reveal this same skill deficiency.

It's your basic "dried-up small Texas town on the border" yawn fest. Even though nothing was spent on a script, there was still no money for production design or for staging action sequences. And unfortunately rather than recognizing their limitations they still tried to stage action sequences (perhaps to keep the cast and crew from dozing on an OD of unoriginality). You pity the poor editor who had to assemble this collection of lame stuff into something vaguely comprehensible, while working to disguise its more amateur qualities.

The story concerns a pretty pair of travelers stranded in a border town after losing their money. They fall in with a pretty boy movie version human coyote and his Gomer companion. R. Lee Ermey gets to reprise his Marine Corps DI shtick (in a role normally reserved for Michael Parks). There is a ton of really obvious "day-for-night" scenes and spaghetti western overuse of filters which call attention to themselves (of course in a story this ordinary the lines of resolution on your screen call attention to themselves). It has a predictable happy ending.

Although the viewer never remotely buys into this being anything but a movie, it is just a few too realistic steps away from parody territory, closing that distance might have turned an extremely tired movie into an entertaining played-for-laughs parody. Maybe next time.

Elizabeth Pena is good as Connie, your basic "Last Picture Show" waitress with a heart of gold. The three leads are all too pretty for the genre and location. The high points of the film are a few big eye close-ups of Marley Shelton with her hair up (she really was breathtakingly beautiful in 2001).

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.