Reviews

We spent all this time watching the characters, getting to know them, and trying to unravel the mystery. And in the end, it was nothing but hoax to further the climate change narrative about big, bad, evil oil companies - Hollywood's standard mustache-twirling villain. What's worse, the characters go along with the kidnapping charade to continue the exposure of the evil oil companies: two of them becoming fugitives, one going to prison, and one covering up the very crime it is his job to uncover. In all, it was a gloriously woke ending that ruined a perfectly good international mystery story.

It was going okay until the toys broke into song, "Santa Don't Forget Us."

Even without the musical interlude, it's not a good movie. With it, you at least get something to make you say, "WTF?"

This movie had amateur acting and bad writing, but a fun plot; almost enough to keep your interest. An elderly patient weaves tales of holiday horror for a lonely and meek nurse who is bullied by an ambitious coworker and a cruel mother. You keep waiting for the murder at the beginning of the movie to be tied in, and eventually it is with a twist. The twist isn't particularly difficult to predict, but it was amusing and added some fun to the movie; a twist straight out of Angel Heart. I gave it a 3 because it tried hard to live up to its ambition, but the hack acting of too many characters and poorly-written dialogue held it back.

With a cheesy script, low-budget CGI, and mediocre acting, the director still manages to coax an almost watchable TV movie out of this mess. The standard horror movie tropes are here: poor decision-making, exaggerated natural dangers (quicksand), characters knocked out by glancing blows, and sidekicks who act like sidekicks and not people with an inner life of their own. The actors try, but they just don't have the chops to play the type of people they're playing. Shannen Doherty is still playing a teenager on 90210, looking earnestly at the other characters seeking approval from the ones in charge. Mattie Ross her character is not. Anachronisms and inconsistencies abound throughout the movie. In one scene, Doherty covers herself as someone sees her bathing in a sleeveless top normally seen as underwear on saloon prostitutes in westerns. In the next scene, she's walking around openly with that same top serving as her shirt - in the late 19th century. The Aztecs had some nice concrete work in their cavern as well as some pretty sophisticated traps. Michael Shanks' character uses a precordial thump to revive another character. In reality, the precordial thump was first documented in 1920, well after this movie takes place. As a made-for-TV adventure movie, it's watchable; kinda reminds me of those Saturday morning serials. I wouldn't pay for it, but it'll do for passing a rainy afternoon while stuck inside.

If you like Hallmark cozy mysteries and don't mind a few factual inaccuracies, you'll probably enjoy this one.

If you like your movies more accurate than fantastic, change the channel.

An SFPD detective goes to a remote barn on a farm to exercise her police powers. San Francisco has a distinct shortage of land for farms. The farm would have to be outside of SF County and city jurisdiction. She'd have had to check-in with and partner with the actual local authorities.

She tells chef-boy that all cops keep the chamber of their guns empty. Why would they do that? It's a good way to get killed when someone pulls a gun on you. Not to mention, she never racked the slide on her back-up weapon, so if she "always" keeps the chamber empty, she couldn't have fired the gun at the bad guy who stole hers.

She tells chef-boy that she could tell from the chamber indicator the the bad guy had not racked a round into the chamber. The chamber indicator is usually only a millimeter or two in size and is located near the chamber, a view she did not have from her vantage point, even if she had the eagle eyes needed to see it from that distance.

Cop-girl acted without back up in a remote location. I'm pretty sure that's against standard procedure for a police detective moving in to arrest a suspect.

The camera work in this movie was terrible. The camera shook in every scene, even in scenes where the camera only needed to show characters talking to each other. Did no one in the camera crew know what a tripod is? If you're prone to vertigo, don't watch this.

The writing was equally amateurish and hackneyed. The characters were all stereotypes and caricatures. Somehow, the writer managed to convey the impression that he's never spoken to another human being in his life and got the dialogue from childhood "Let's Pretend" games.

Even the scenes that were supposed to ratchet up the tension were pretty hokey. The "North by Northwest" inspired crop-duster scene was all the worse for being in slo-mo - no tension whatsoever.

Writers of movies need to do research and the writer of this clearly did none. Early in the movie, a character says the setting is Spoon River, Illinois. Yet, somehow, the Civil War was fought in the woods just outside of town. Um, the Confederates never got that far north.

The worst sin of this movie was having no point and no story to tell. It rambled from one scene to another with very little cohesion and never reached a point where you could actually tell what the movie was supposed to be about.