20 Horror Movies for $7.50 — Part XIII of XX.

A woman awakens from a nightmare at 3:25, no 3:26.  I feel sorry for directors — they want to establish the time, but there’s not much you can do with a digital clock, so they always have the same hackneyed shot of the minute clicking over.  And that’s all we get before the title. Not exactly setting us up for a thrillride.

Cedric the aspiring entertainer is on his bike in New York City looking for a vocalist for his band.  Apparently auditions are passé, and such career opportunities are now offered to random strangers.  He is talking to one candidate on the sidewalk, but she turns out to be a poet — so close!  Ebony, the woman with the nightmare, sees her old friend Cedric, so he offers her the job.

They go out the next night Cedric finds out she had been dating a white guy.  His racist response, “I don’t know why you’re frontin’, dating all these vanilla guys.  You know you need a brother in your life.”  He further sweet talks her by accusing her white boyfriend of having a small dick and stating that “You know brothers is the ones with the anacondas.”  Off to the side, we see a leather clad figure crumbling a red rose in his hands.

The next night, Vanilla white guy Alex breaks into her bedroom and begins assaulting her.  She fights him off, and he immediately disappears as her father comes to her rescue, assuring her it must have been a dream.  But could we have had one shot of maybe an open or closed window to give us a clue?

Ebony explains to some vanilla white girl named Candice — roommate, best friend? — while painting each other’s toenails that she dropped Alex when he began to get into sorcery, magic and Gothic spells. Ebony, as a Christian, “is not down with that shit” as they say in church.  Alex calls, but Ebony tells him it’s still over.  That night she has another nightmare about Alex.

Ebony goes to see Cedric whose advances she had blown off earlier that night.  But, damn the timing, he is getting blown off again by his old girlfriend Dee — and the good way.

That night Candice has a scary but non-eventful wait for the subway.  At home, Candice erases two messages without listening to them, I guess assuming they are from someone who had harassed her cell phone earlier.  She pours a class of wine and sees a man down on the street doing something, but it is impossible to see what she finds so menacing about him.

She runs for her landline but gets a “the number you have reached is not in service at this time” recording, so she runs for her cellphone.  Candice mutters something unintelligible, but why does she think her cellphone will get through when her land line will not?  She picks up the cell and it shows a text message “I AM COMING TO KILL YOUR ASS!”

Rather than call, oh say, 9-1-1, Candice begins running down the stairs toward the guy. He has the same idea and begins running up the stairs.  He follows her back to her apartment and she is able to take a baseball bat to him, unfortunately about as effectively as the girls in The Cellar Door.  In the next inning, he begins beating her beside the bath-tub, but she recognizes him and says “You?”  He crumbles a red rose over her dead not-naked body.

Cedric figures it was Alex and says, “I’ll kill his cracker ass!” Fortunately, his friend and business partner Kyle is more level headed.  Kyle then also goes to Ebony to hit on her. Ebony shows him the door also.

Cedric’s girlfriend Dee calls Ebony and threatens to kill her if her man Cedric is there. As she is leaving to kick Ebony’s ass, the leather-clad man is at her door and kills her. Thank God.  Ebonys’ father comes in to see what is upsetting her, but he makes it clear that he had no use for her “cracker” boyfriend either.

And then some other stuff happens.  Finally, Alex possesses the body of Cedric.  He explains how he killed everyone, and emerges in the form of Alex; with a pentagram carved in his forehead.  Somehow Ebony sends Alex back to hell.

She and racist, cheating Cedric head out for LA, because he’s such a catch.  The detective walks out of the room and says , “I’m going to have a hard time explaining this.”  You and me both.

This seemed like a borderline racist white guy’s idea of making a black indie movie. Other than Ebony, there were really no black characters to root for.  Cedric is an asshole, cheating on his girlfriend, Kyle is a good guy, but then you are lead to believe that he is the murderer.  Both are assigned the character of “aspiring rap artists” which shows up in a lot of crime reports.  Dee is just a caricature of a loud-mouth obnoxious black woman.  Even Ebony’s father seems like a nice guy until he starts calling her boyfriend a cracker.

On the other hand, the voices of authority and reasonableness are Ebony’s white friend Candice and the white detectives. These just seem like strange choices from a black writer / director. The ultimate bad guy — the murderer — is white, however.  So props for that, yo.

Post-Post:

• I had never seen any of these actors, except Ebony’s father in other shows.
• The roses were not emphasized or explained enough to warrant the title.

20 Horror Movies for $7.50 — Part XII of XX. Now there’s a Lifetime title if ever I saw one.

A teenage girl is delivering papers, being followed inconspicuously by a 20 year old land yacht the size of a sea yacht.  Jessica (Joanna Kerns) and the geezer across the street pick up their well-targeted soon-to-be obsolete dead-tree papers.

Shorty thereafter, the girl’s bike is found wrecked with black and white and red all over.  Formerly married detectives Beth Jordan and Greg Coming are on the case, keenly observing, “It doesn’t look like this was done by a friend.”  Greg further miraculously deduces with Holmesian implausibility that the girl was taken to the river.

He turns out to be correct as her body is quickly found.  Immediately after Beth says they need twice as many men to cover the area, Greg finds the girl 10 feet from him. The coroner determines that she has been stabbed, strangled and raped.  Also probably not the work of a friend.

For the 3rd time, we cut to Jessica and her co-worker husband Dan at the office, but so little happens that it is hardly worth noting.  After starting a new company 5 years ago, they finally take a vacation.  Just before leaving, they get the news that their newspaper girl has been murdered in their neighborhood, so at least they won’t have to cancel delivery.  Now if someone could just knock off the postman.  Bye, bon voyage!

Window Break-In # 1

After some fly-fishing (sadly not a metaphor), Dan is cooking their catch over a fire when we get the TV-movie version of a seduction — Jessica’s silhouette stripping in a suspiciously back-lit tent,  wrapping herself in a towel and inviting Dan in — he and dinner are both f***ed.

When they return home, they think Jessica’s sister left the door unlocked.  But Carol did lock the door — someone broke in through a very insecure window and creepily laid out a lot of Jessica’s clothes and rifled through her drawers; and her drawers.  Gallantly, the next night Dan goes away on a business trip.

Window Break-In # 2

Jessica hears a door open and assumes Dan is home early.  But it turns out to be the guy who likes newspaper girls, who has broken through that same window a 2nd time. He also seems to like older women as he pulls a knife on Jessica.  She manages to get away, but only as far as the front lawn, screaming for help. The geezer across the street, thinking some kids might be on his lawn, comes out and scares the assailant off — but not before he inflicts some damage.

Her husband graciously comes home early.  When the doctor suggests a rape test be done, her husband, of course, knowing better than his wife or the doctor, says it won’t be necessary.  She says it is probably a good idea.  Dan turns into a real distant, unsupportive asshole after his wife has been raped, but he does at least spring for an expensive home security system.  So she’s safe now.

Window Break-In # 3

The day after telling the police how to do their job, Dan goes in to work.  As Dan pulls away from the curb of their house — not apartment, condo, duplex or high-rise, but their single unit house — the rapist’s enormous 20 year old behemoth of a car is highlariously revealed to be have been parked inches behind him.  This would be like Dennis Weaver not noticing there was a truck behind him in Duel.

Within minutes the alarm goes off and it is revealed that the naughty boy has for the 3rd time come through that same damn window that might as well say Rapists Entrance. Here’s a security tip — lock that f***ing window!  It is never broken.  It always seems to have been neatly lifted out of the frame.

I understand Jessica’s theory that the rapist must kill her because she has seen his face, but why does he choose a neighborhood cookout for his next attempt.  I guess he was peeking through the fence and saw he go into her house, so naturally he came in through that same damn window for a 4th time, without having to so much as scratch it.

Window Break-In # 4

He gets away that time, and soon the detective is staking out their house.  While Jessica and Dan have made up and are cuddling upstairs, the detective must decide where to position himself.

Hmmmm, use your detective training, apply that Holmesian steel-trap of a mind, think like a rapist.  Maybe . . . the attic, the basement?  No — wait for him in the kitchen — that’s the ticket!

Yeah, no reason to worry about that same goddamn unsecure window — that he indeed slips in for the fifth time!  He uses that window like Hogan’s Heroes used their tunnel.

Finally (hooray for the 2nd amendment) the guns come out, but it is really a deus ex machina, or serendipitous ending — choose your fancy word.  But it is allegedly based on a true story, so who knows.  But for the love of god, can we at least lock that window?

Joanna Kerns is perfectly fine as Jessica and actually gets better as the movie progresses, but her husband is a complete stiff.  True, he plays an unsympathetic character in the last half of the movie, but I had an immediate dislike, or worse — indifference — to him from the first frame.

Window Break-In # 5

Dan Luria comes off very natural as the detective.  Christina Cox as his partner was very captivating in her 1980’s suits (despite it being 1996).

I wish Joanna Kerns had done a worse job so I could rate this No One Could Direct Her.

She, Dan Luria and Christina Cox make it watchable, but just barely.  And definitely not recommendable.

Post-Post:

• I wasn’t overly impressed with the performances, but I must say Joanna Kerns’ portrayal of being knocked conscious seemed about as realistic as I can imagine. Bravo on that scene — it might initially come off as slightly hammy, but it really seemed true and effective to me.
• Christina Cox was kind of a young Hillary Swank, but then in 1996, she was a young Christina Cox.  But I did love those suits — kudos to the costumers.  A phrase I’m not sure I’ve ever used.

20 Horror Movies for $7.50 — Part XI of XX.

The action starts immediately on The Raven in a storm of the kind that caused us to lose the Minnow.  A man yells, “They’re going to kill us,” and another man helpfully lends him credibility by breaking a 2 x 4 across his back.

His wife scrambles across the slick bow trying to escape, but she gets into a girl-fight of her own. Eventually one of of the men gets thrown over the side and we flash . . . well it’s not clear whether it is a FlashForward, flashback, or flashsideways.

At a fancy 20th anniversary party on a yacht (and, really, what other kind of party would there be on a yacht than fancy?), Katie is assuring her friends she will not miss the depositions and legal work during during the month it will take to sail first to Somoa with her husband the judge during their 3-month cruise.  3-month cruise.

The “gruff” judge looks much older than Katie, but only has 6 years on her according to IMDb.  Katie is played by the sexiest of the original Charlie’s Angels . . . no, not her . . . no, the other one . . . no. seriously, Kate Jackson.  She was pretty cute, plus I subscribed to the smart-is-sexy school of thought.  Until Cheryl Ladd came along — then I transferred to  the smoking-hot-blonde-in-a-bikini school of thought.^[1]

At the party, she awkwardly runs into an old affair who is still won’t accept that she is devoted to her 20-year marriage and family.  Hmmm, I wonder if that 20 second scene will come up later.

Once out on the sea, Katie doesn’t seem to be having fun.  That night, during an elegant dinner in a dining room that seems far larger than the outside of the boat, Guy suggests some hanky and/or panky under the stars.  Their plans (or, at least his) for eating al fresco is interrupted by a radar signal from a ship which seems to be abandoned.  They find The Raven messier than my condo and it seems to have been abandoned in a hurry. Down below, they find Nick and Eliza alive, but in bad mental, physical and smelling condition.

They were 2 weeks out of Bali when they ran into something that tore off their propeller. Eventually, the crew went crazy from the sun (apparently not realizing there was a nice below-deck area), turned on them, and they threw the scalawags overboard.  Guy calls the Coast Guard to come pick up the derelict ship.

Katie spills the beans about an affair she had with a lawyer she works with.  It doesn’t help that that night they can hear Nick (Bruce Greenwood) and Eliza going at it.  Guy can’t help but notice that Katie and Nick have some close moments on deck as she teaches him how to sail.

Nick asks about the death penalty and Guy says it is too serious too discuss.  Eliza is worried about what they did.  Justice being blind, Guy can’t seem to make the connection.

The set-up has a lot of potential.  The strained relationship between Katie and Guy, psychological problems Nick has due to an abusive childhood, Eliza’s manipulation of Nick, Katie’s competing manipulation of Nick’s weakness, Eliza being a psychopath, the claustrophobia of being alone at sea, and a medical vulnerability of Eliza that Kate takes delicious advantage of.

Just like Hush, there is a lot of cat and mouse over the next hour, a battle of wits in a confined area.  It starts out being strictly a Lifetime TV melodrama, but it does consistently pick up steam.  It never reaches the level of Dead Calm, but who expects it to?  The director just did not make enough of a mark, leaving it mostly point-and-shoot with a score that I don’t recall a note of.

The leads all do a fine job.  Oddly, it is the bit parts that seem awkward.  The man she had the affair with doesn’t exactly exude alpha-maleness in his 20 seconds of screen time.  And their daughter is pretty much a non-entity who got her looks from her father.

Not great, but everyone gets their job done.

Post-Post:

• [1] Truthfully, the hottest of the Angels was Shelly Hack.  Sadly, by then the show had run it’s course and no one cared.  She should have had a much greater career.
• This was 2 years before Bruce Greenwood was in the excellent, but ironically, given the plot, forgotten Nowhere Man.