Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great suspense thriller!, December 17, 1999
This movie was really wonderful. When 2 lovers after a vacation in Mexico get back on the road to return home to the U.S., they hit a police officer who staggered into the road. Fearing the Mexican legal system, they leave the dead policeman in hopes to return to the states without being caught. With terrible feelings of guilt about what they have done, they try to move on with thier lives. Then an unexpected visitor from Mexico enters thier lives and nothing will ever be the same again. This movie is full of suspense and terror and a surprising twist that may help this couple to move on with thier lives, if they can escape thier adversary that has plagued them since thier return and continues to haunt them. A great movie that will leave you shocked and scared!
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
An unpleasant, insulting formula exploitation film, April 27, 2007
This was without a doubt one of the worst movies I have ever seen. To see talented, intelligent actors like Ron Silver, Rebecca DeMornay, and Mariska Hargitay caught up in it was all the more appalling. The best that can possibly be said about the film is that DeMornay looks beautiful on screen. I cannot discuss how dismally bad a movie this is without summarizing what happens. I try to stick to the main story line, without giving away certain details.
The movie begins with a "happy scene" of husband and wife Doug and Lynn Kaines (Silver and DeMornay) wrapping up a Mexican vacation, preparatory to moving their specialty furniture-making business south of the border. They head home to the U.S., driving to the border at night on a lonely, isolated road. Disaster strikes when a man staggers out of the fog in front of their car. The man bounces off the windshield and into a ditch. After checking to see that he looks dead, with his "brains coming out of his head," the couple drives off.
The movie then devotes itself to nothing more than coming up with a steady stream of cliche, melodramatic, and extreme ways to torment these two people. It is all done for cheap effect, without any larger purpose or meaning. It is unpleasantness for unpleasantness sake. Plot details about the killing in Mexico, which are injected at various points, seem almost beside the point.
First, there is a trumped-up scene at the border where guards become hostile and then just walk away. Next, the couple bickers, has stagey, protracted nightmares or daydreams about the dead man's face colliding with their windshield, and generally wallows in guilt about the hit-and-run. For example, a scene with the couple behind the wheel, lost in thought, while their vehicle goes through a car wash drags on endlessly, capped by the ugly image of a somehow still-bloody eyebrow becoming dislodged from the windshield wiper.
Then, mysterious hulking stranger Jake Shell (Rutger Hauer) shows up. He has vacant expressions and vague, clumsy speech that are supposed to be sinister but quickly become a mannered, exaggerated, annoying, and time-wasting gimmick. Shell aggressively tries to insinuate himself into their home and business by dropping hints, over and over again, that he has come up from Mexico and knows about the car accident.
The couple makes tedious, pointless attempts to drive him away, such as a wasted scene with a lawyer, or to keep him close at hand. Apparently for the sheer sake of it, Shell escalates his activities to whatever sick, vicious, sadistic behavior the writers can think of next to throw in with the kitchen sink. When the couple's show room employee Hargitay, acting like a ditzy moron, goes with Shell to his apartment on a date, he brutalizes her during exaggerated "kinky" sex, causing her to quit. Shell makes hammy, "weird" advances toward DeMornay, including surprising her in the sauna. Her pregnant character loses her baby. Silver is beaten up. Shell helps himself to a videotape of the couple making love and then taunts them with it.
There is another brief "happy scene," with the return of "happy music," when the two think they have persuaded Shell to go away for money. Not for long. More advances, abuse, and beatings. Shell invades the Kaines' home, with a floosie in tow, trashes the house, shorts out the wiring on the sauna trying to raise the temperature to boiling hot, and forces the Kaines to listen all night to his raucous sex.
As if this were not enough, then the movie really goes over the top (or dredges rock-bottom). The last 15 minutes degenerates into nothing but a continuous brawl and shoot-out. Shell becomes a Frankenstein monster that nothing can stop -- not punches, not objects broken over his head, not a fall from a second-story window, not a wound to the chest, not being immolated by flames, almost not by electrocution.
In one of the worst scenes I have ever seen in any movie, Shell takes a break from the intimidation and fighting to leave the house momentarily to go to his camper-truck. He returns to the house, framed in the front doorway, lit from the back with what looks like fog all around him, dressed like a cowboy with two six-shooters. The camera repeatedly zooms in on his eye next to a bloody gash on his head. Silver and DeMornay have to stand there for humiliating reaction shots.
Shell proceeds to fire all around the couple, shattering lamps and windows and setting the house ablaze. When Shell himself is consumed by flames, he goes flailing out to the sauna and dives in. This creates a chance for some final embarrassing lines from DeMornay to Shell, with Silver lying wounded nearby: "You want this?" she says, tearing off one of several layers of clothes, "You afraid of me?" Shell resumes shrieking and firing bullets, even while going into wild convulsions when the couple team up to clumsily and obviously toss an electric lamp into the sauna. Sirens blare in the background (where were the neighbors through all of this?). With the house burning down, the movie fades to the credits, as if to say all the movie leaves behind is a heap of ashes.
All of the torment, violence, and sexual content is exploited for nothing more than empty, mindless, voyeuristic shock value. The movie is not even true to its convictions in exploiting the sexual content, which makes it lame and incompetent on that level, too. There are numerous scenes with heavy-handed sexual overtones, but the only nudity (even in the so-called "Unrated" version) is a brief topless shot of the least-known actress, Tamara Clatterbuck, in a frivolous scene. Nor is the movie original. It is a cheap formula rip-off of films like Cape Fear.
This movie was a tedious, trying, insulting, offensive disaster. That some reviews try to pretend otherwise is a pathetic example of just how low standards have sunk. When the only problem an otherwise breathlessly enthusiastic review sees in a movie like this is that a character calls the couple's Ford Explorer a "jeep," something is terribly wrong.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
FUN TO WATCH, July 23, 2008
This film is lots of fun to watch for the excellent acting (see especially Mariska Hagerty as a dark haired beauty who foolishly gets involved with the villain). The movie has an interesting story line about a couple who are blackmailed by an individual who claims to have seen them commit vehicular homicide. The film is not deep but the story holds your attention as the characters manipulate themselves and each other in and out of corners. I first saw the movie several years ago but it stayed in my mind enough that I bought the DVD when I saw it on Amazon.If you are at home wanting good entertainment for a couple of hours without the typical Hollywood social propaganda this is a really good movie.
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