This film was a pleasant surprise, with a very interesting plot, loosely based on a true story. All of the actors and actresses put in very good performances, as did Jesse Vint, writing, directing and his cameo appearance. My date and I enjoyed it very much, especially the ending. Riveting story, in this day and age of so many violent young criminals with seemingly no conscience. This brought to the screen for substantially less than an average feature film's catering budget. Liked Mr. Nassar's review, but I'm still waiting to see one of Fluffy Kittys productions.... I give this movie a 7. And definitely worth watching if you have any view on capital punishment either way.
6 Reviews
Terrible
Ivop30 January 2004
From the start, you know how this movie will end. It's so full of clichés your typical NRA member will not even like this movie. I give it 2 out of 10, only because of the acting of William Benton. I can't believe people voted 6+ for this movie. It's so biased towards a 'certain point of view' (once a thief...). People aren't born bad. Neither are they born good. They are born with a clean slate. It's society, parents and education what makes them who they are. And if they take the wrong turn, somewhere down the line, it certainly isn't going to be the American penal system that gets them back on track! Anyway, avoid this movie like the plague. I bet you have better things to do with your time than waste it on this piece of crap.
Excellent dark comedy!
rogueheart24 January 2005
Warning: Spoilers
One of the actors in the film submitted this for me to see, since I am involved in the casting of a current film. I knew it was a Roger Corman release---my expectations were low. However, this dialogue heavy digital film was a complete surprise. The story idea and subject matter could certainly float a much larger budget.
This story deals with a highly successful best selling non-fictional writer who writes on the subject of criminal rehabilitation. The fact that he lives in a gated community (Beverly Hills) and is well-insulated, not only from the criminals that he writes about, but his own ideas as well, never really occurs to him. The writer/director does mention the source of his inspiration in the film -- Norman Mailer---and how Mailer fought to have a criminal released---and the criminal a short while later knifed a kid in broad daylight while Mailer was in the safety of his high-security penthouse. Mailer's hypocrisy seems to be the engine that drives this story.
The Beverly Hills writer is soon confronted with a problem: His high-school friends call from (Kentucky, I think) and tell him that their son was just released from prison and is now being hunted by the local drug mafia. They fear for their son's life and beg the famous writer to allow the kid to come live with him for a short while until the danger passes---and who knows, the writer might even influence the kid to do well, since the kid supposedly idolizes the writer from childhood. The writer sees no way out, that it's a matter of honor---he is bound by the obligation of a deep childhood friendship to help these friends any way he can. He also sees it as a way to test his theories first hand, which he has never done. He agrees to allow the kid, a extremely charming and deceitful young con man in his early twenties, to come to Beverly Hills and live with him. The writer vows to exert every positive influence that he possibly can on the rehabilitation of the kid.
What follows is that slowly and incrementally the writer's fairy-tale existence begins to capsize. Eventually the writer realizes that he is living a nightmare, the kid is a dangerous psychopath that is far beyond rehabilitation, and so decide to tell the kid that he has to go. He confronts the kid, the kid pulls a gun that he found in the house and duct tapes the writer to a chair, taunts him, and kills the writer's daughter. The writer eventually breaks free, bangs the kid over the head with a (something) and in a classic twist of irony, stacks up his best selling books about criminal rehabilitation, pours gasoline over them and sets them on fire, and burns the criminal kid at the stake in the back yard of his Beverly Hills mansion.
It seems to me that the writer was not saying (as stated in some of the other comments) that rehabilitation of criminals is futile; it seems to me that he was saying that in some cases it cannot be done (Charles Manson for example) and that the premature release of some of them is a gross mistake (i.e., Norman Mailer incident).
I particularly enjoyed some of the dialogue---and the performance of the actor, William Benton. This guy was both funny and terrifying at the same time---an extremely difficult, if not a near impossible note to hit. But all the actors were good. There was no weak performance. Why this was sold as a "thriller", I have no idea. I guess it's Roger Corman's way. But it seems to revitalize the old joke that "A conservative is a liberal that has been mugged."
It has a lot of laughs, so I recommend it for anybody, but especially those who are interested in digital film-making.
This story deals with a highly successful best selling non-fictional writer who writes on the subject of criminal rehabilitation. The fact that he lives in a gated community (Beverly Hills) and is well-insulated, not only from the criminals that he writes about, but his own ideas as well, never really occurs to him. The writer/director does mention the source of his inspiration in the film -- Norman Mailer---and how Mailer fought to have a criminal released---and the criminal a short while later knifed a kid in broad daylight while Mailer was in the safety of his high-security penthouse. Mailer's hypocrisy seems to be the engine that drives this story.
The Beverly Hills writer is soon confronted with a problem: His high-school friends call from (Kentucky, I think) and tell him that their son was just released from prison and is now being hunted by the local drug mafia. They fear for their son's life and beg the famous writer to allow the kid to come live with him for a short while until the danger passes---and who knows, the writer might even influence the kid to do well, since the kid supposedly idolizes the writer from childhood. The writer sees no way out, that it's a matter of honor---he is bound by the obligation of a deep childhood friendship to help these friends any way he can. He also sees it as a way to test his theories first hand, which he has never done. He agrees to allow the kid, a extremely charming and deceitful young con man in his early twenties, to come to Beverly Hills and live with him. The writer vows to exert every positive influence that he possibly can on the rehabilitation of the kid.
What follows is that slowly and incrementally the writer's fairy-tale existence begins to capsize. Eventually the writer realizes that he is living a nightmare, the kid is a dangerous psychopath that is far beyond rehabilitation, and so decide to tell the kid that he has to go. He confronts the kid, the kid pulls a gun that he found in the house and duct tapes the writer to a chair, taunts him, and kills the writer's daughter. The writer eventually breaks free, bangs the kid over the head with a (something) and in a classic twist of irony, stacks up his best selling books about criminal rehabilitation, pours gasoline over them and sets them on fire, and burns the criminal kid at the stake in the back yard of his Beverly Hills mansion.
It seems to me that the writer was not saying (as stated in some of the other comments) that rehabilitation of criminals is futile; it seems to me that he was saying that in some cases it cannot be done (Charles Manson for example) and that the premature release of some of them is a gross mistake (i.e., Norman Mailer incident).
I particularly enjoyed some of the dialogue---and the performance of the actor, William Benton. This guy was both funny and terrifying at the same time---an extremely difficult, if not a near impossible note to hit. But all the actors were good. There was no weak performance. Why this was sold as a "thriller", I have no idea. I guess it's Roger Corman's way. But it seems to revitalize the old joke that "A conservative is a liberal that has been mugged."
It has a lot of laughs, so I recommend it for anybody, but especially those who are interested in digital film-making.
serviceable but politically motivated thriller
alannasser17 September 2003
The film opens with a killer up for parole. His morally intense plea to the parole board that he is a redeemed man convinces the board to release him. But this guy is in fact an entirely unrepentant sociopathic killer, who quickly ingratiates himself to a well-off Beverly Hills family, headed by an over-the-top caricature of a liberal do-gooder. We first meet this man at a book-signing event.
The book is a plea against capital punishment, and represents the life work of Mr. Do-Good, a prominent author. A doubter in the crowd asks the author whether he doesn't know that some people are just born evil and beyond redemption. Do-Good responds with a canned speech to the effect that violent criminals are made by society and therefore never deserve to be put to death for their crimes. This moment is dwelt upon by the director, and Do-Good's smug earnestness is throughout the picture made to look like Newt Gingrich's version of everything that is wrong with "liberalism."
Do-Good's daughter is initially wary of dad's decision to take the sociopath in as a lodger, but she is quickly -and inexplicably- won over by what to the viewer are the transparently sham charms of the killer. The blindness of the family to what is presented as the conspicuous lunacy of the sociopath is a continuous theme of the movie. Once the daughter is attracted to the killer the plot thickens and moderately suspenseful and violent events unfold as expected. The actor playing the killer is quite convincing. Daddy Do-Good is a talented community theater performer. Still, the movie held my attention, as any competently made derivative thriller will for me.
What struck me most about this movie is its in-your-face anti-anti-capital punishment stance - a movie that tries to be simultaneously a tense violent thriller *and* an unremitting, hardly subtle political statement. Whatever your position on capital punishment, you can't help but slap your knee at that. I thought of the director -John What's-His-Name- who made a well known movie with Patrick Swayze about the Soviets attacking America by.... dropping paratroopers into the heartland!
The book is a plea against capital punishment, and represents the life work of Mr. Do-Good, a prominent author. A doubter in the crowd asks the author whether he doesn't know that some people are just born evil and beyond redemption. Do-Good responds with a canned speech to the effect that violent criminals are made by society and therefore never deserve to be put to death for their crimes. This moment is dwelt upon by the director, and Do-Good's smug earnestness is throughout the picture made to look like Newt Gingrich's version of everything that is wrong with "liberalism."
Do-Good's daughter is initially wary of dad's decision to take the sociopath in as a lodger, but she is quickly -and inexplicably- won over by what to the viewer are the transparently sham charms of the killer. The blindness of the family to what is presented as the conspicuous lunacy of the sociopath is a continuous theme of the movie. Once the daughter is attracted to the killer the plot thickens and moderately suspenseful and violent events unfold as expected. The actor playing the killer is quite convincing. Daddy Do-Good is a talented community theater performer. Still, the movie held my attention, as any competently made derivative thriller will for me.
What struck me most about this movie is its in-your-face anti-anti-capital punishment stance - a movie that tries to be simultaneously a tense violent thriller *and* an unremitting, hardly subtle political statement. Whatever your position on capital punishment, you can't help but slap your knee at that. I thought of the director -John What's-His-Name- who made a well known movie with Patrick Swayze about the Soviets attacking America by.... dropping paratroopers into the heartland!
Unintentionally funny, so bad it's good.
xakuma12 July 2005
I cannot believe this film was made in 2003, the whole movie looks like it was filmed on a cheap camcorder. The box cover is really deceiving and leads you to believe that it will be somewhat good. With my sense of humor, I found this movie to be hilarious. The dialog is so scripted and the characters are just unintentionally weird. The music they play is this movie is hysterical, it's like really bad 90's techno and the main character totally gets into it randomly throughout the movie, he'll just start dancing like a complete moron. The two main bad guys are a complete joke, they get angry with the main character over a lousy $40 pool bet and then start beating him up while playing the harmonica and jump ontop of cars, doing karate kicks, this movie could have been a spoof but it was dead serious which to me is hilarious. RENT THIS MOVIE!
This Movie....Where Do I Begin?
Rose_Dawson9 November 2003
There are so many things wrong with this movie I can't even count them all. The acting sucks, the plot is completely unbelievable, so are the characters, the camera work is all off....this is just a really really bad movie. Do yourself a favor and never see it. Ever ever ever. You're not missing a great piece of cinematic art, that's for sure.
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