Reviews

These have to be the two least sympathetic dudes on TV right now. "Real estate investors" Scott and George lost their shirts when the market crashed, and rather than, I don't know, GETTING A JOB like everyone else in America, they decide to abandon their wives with their many, many young children and go risk their lives (and hundreds of thousands of private investors' dollars) to mine for gold in Africa. This is the equivalent of betting your life savings on a roulette wheel, if the roulette wheel was in the middle of the jungle in Ghana. The guys whine nonstop when their pipe dream of getting rich without doing any work doesn't go smoothly (rest assured, the only people actually working on this show are the nameless African locals who toil day in and day out for pennies so these clueless meatheads can pay the mortgage on their Utah McMansions).

Some lowlights include: the guys flat-out lie to their private investor to try to squeeze more money out of him; one of the guys tries to make some quick cash through a shady deal to be a "middleman" for a "gold dealer" to "sell large quantities of gold to rich Americans" (the deal fell through when the dealer spotted the hidden camera the show sent in to the meeting); the guys walk out on their partners, who stepped in when it became clear that these dudes know absolutely nothing about gold mining and kept the operation running, but blame the partners for not finding enough gold; the guys decide to take the last $30,000 (of their investors' money) and use it to buy a $75,000 gold bar from some random shady dude in the middle of nowhere--to the surprise of no one but Scott and George, it's a trap, and they walk away without the money or the gold; after catastrophically failing and blowing an amount of money that most Americans could easily live on for 5 years (money that didn't belong to them in the first place), Scott and George learn their lesson, and return to their families determined to find decent, steady, respectable jobs and simply work to pay down their debts and support their families. JUST KIDDING! The guys vow they will return to Ghana, presumably with some other naive investor's money, to try again.

Honestly, the ONLY reason to watch this show is the schadenfreude of seeing one horrible thing after another happen to these terrible guys.

OK, I admit it... for pure entertainment value, this made-for-TV movie came through. I wasn't expecting much from a hostage movie, and had to roll my eyes when it was the clichéd African-American criminal taking the suburban white woman hostage. But, against my will, I totally got sucked into this movie. Taken hostage by it, if you will. (Ha ha ha).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not denying the movie isn't cheesy as all get out. It is. But something about it just made me unable to change the channel. It might have been Giancarlo Esposito, who was absolutely fantastic. Sharon Lawrence did an alright job, but Esposito just completely stole show.

I don't think this is really a spoiler, but I will confess to having actual tears streaming down my face at the end.

A movie worth seeing, although it's not cover-your-eyes scary.

Very nicely shot, and while the "scary" trees were kind of cheesy, I LOVED seeing a re-match between Bruce Campbell and the branches (a la Evil Dead).

I actually thought the best thing in the film was the overlay of a creepy vocal track onto Leslie Gore's "You Don't Own Me." It plays over the credits and I watched until the very end just to listen to it.

Parts were decently gory, and although the climax wasn't 100% coherent I appreciated the splatter.

The only other complaint I have is that it seemed anachronistic at times. The hairstyle and look of the main character was decidedly modern, in contrast with her mother (who had great '60s hair). And at one point, two of the girls share an earbud on a set of headphones that looked like they go to an iPod. Did they have earbuds back then?

I like gory, cheesy slasher flicks as much as anybody, and it actually amazes me how bad this one was. I'm not sure if this re-make was supposed to be funny or scary, but it was neither. The acting was abysmal. I've seen home movies better than this.

So we start with all these girls who live in this one apartment building getting killed. But no one notices/believes anything has happened to them... because they are unmarried, I guess? Fortunately, a married woman moves into the building and risks her life to find a missing neighbor with whom she had a ten-minute conversation. Naturally, her husband (a young doctor who apparently got stuck with the dreaded 24-hour on-call shift) comes home for the first time since they moved into the apartment just in time to save her from the killer. Oh, and the other hero is a teenager who sits in front of his computer all day leering at one of the girls through a web cam she doesn't know about that is pointed at her bed. Classy.

There's some kind of deeper story about the apartment building and how the killer is attached to building and blah blah blah, but I lost track of it half-way through when it got so boring I zoned out for a few minutes.

I especially loved the character that you are supposed to think is the killer--a great cameo by the caveman from those insurance commercials. Oh, and the obligatory cute old man who almost saves the day and dies.

Mr. Hooper, I'd like my 90 minutes back.