Tag: TVM

Taken: The Search for Sophie Parker

  By

★★½
“Taken-ish.”

For a Lifetime Original Movie, this is actually close to the best of its kind I’ve seen., but it is surely docked points for being a thoroughly shameless knock-off of a certain Liam Neeson movie, all the way down to the title. As there, we have an American abroad, searching for a teenage daughter who has been kidnapped by even more foreign sex-traffickers. They will stop at nothing – nothing, I tell ya! – to recover their child, be that personal danger or interference from local corrupt police. The main difference is it’s a heroine, NYPD detective Stevie Parker (Benz), with the location being shifted from Paris to Moscow – though under current circumstances, the location has not aged well.

Certainly, letting your daughter Sophie (Battrick) now go by herself to Russia, even if she is friends with the ambassador’s daughter,  would feel like utterly irresponsible parenting. Even a decade ago when this was made, it seems questionable, and concerns prove justified. Despite the presence of lurking CIA minder Nadia (Bailey), it’s not long before Sophie and her pal have snuck out, gone to a nightclub, been roofied, and are on their way to becoming the playthings for some rich tycoon, courtesy of the Chechen mafia. Mama Parker is not happy. She’s on the first plane to Moscow, where she teams with Nadia and reluctant local cop Mikhail (Byron, who’s English, though his IMDb credits are littered with Eastern Europeans!) to work her way up the chain and rescue the girls.

It’s never less than glaringly obvious, and the first thirty minutes are especially excruciating in this department, not least due to a shoehorned romance for Stevie: it is Lifetime, after all. Once she arrives in Russia – actually, Bulgaria standing in for it – while things don’t get any less predictable, the energy level ramps up several degrees, and this becomes considerably more watchable. Benz has the necessary intensity to be the unstoppable force she needs to be, and pairing her with another woman is an additional wrinkle that works nicely. The action is a bit limited, with the only real sequence of note at the end, when the pair storm the hotel where Sophie is being held before her departure, followed by a chase back to US sovereign territory at the embassy.

There’s no denying a major case of American saviour complex here, with the locals being portrayed as useless or actively evil, and needing the help of the USA in order for any action to be taken. Chris noted the presence of a large Stars and Stripes in the film’s final shot, and it seems entirely deliberate, reminding viewers that they are now back on safe, i.e. American soil. Yet there is surprising darkness, not least in the  uncompromising fate meted out to the corrupt official. After a start where this struggled to hold my attention, by the end I was being just about adequately entertained. Given the source, that’s high praise indeed. 

Dir: Don Michael Paul
Star: Julie Benz, Amy Bailey, Andrew Byron, Naomi Battrick

Brenda Starr

  By

★★½
“A bit lacking in Starr quality.”

No, not the eighties version of Brenda Starr: that is well known, and justifiably much derided, to the point it didn’t even reach the necessary level for inclusion here. But neither was it the first version of the comic-strip to reach the screen. Well, at least the small screen. There had previously been a 1945 series, Brenda Starr, Reporter, though some reports describe this as nearly action-free. But the late seventies saw two television efforts: as well as the one under discussion here, three years later in 1979, there was an unsold television pilot movie (now apparently lost) in which Sherry Jackson played the intrepid girl journalist. In contrast, this appears to have been intended as a stand-alone from the get-go. While I’m sure ABC wouldn’t have minded had this been successful enough to become a franchise, it suffers from much the same problem as all the other adaptations, with a heroine that’s too passive to pass muster

However, as TV movies go, this isn’t terrible. It hits the ground running, with Brenda (St. John) investigating the case of reclusive millionaire Lance O’Toole (Buono), who arrives in Los Angeles and goes straight to hospital, apparently being taken down by voodoo magic. Starr is tussling for the scoop with her nemesis, fellow reporter Roger Randall (Buono), though he’s a mere TV anchor, and so the subject of her disdain. Meanwhile, other rich people – including her paper’s owner – are getting blackmail letters demanding $5 million, after the death of O’Toole. Brenda gets a tip and heads for Brazil, the apparent source of the voodoo practices (though let’s be honest, this is one of the least convincing depictions of South America you’ll see!). There, she finds that, things aren’t quite as they seem. O’Toole is far from dead, and in fact is working on creating a new world order, with Ms. Starr scheduled as his queen. Randall is also hot on the tail of the story, though he is arguably even less action-oriented than Brenda.

About the peak of the action is St. John – or, more accurately, her stunt double – climbing out of a bedroom window and down the shrubbery to the ground. However, there was a surprisingly high body-count; we were perplexed by the rather callous way in which the heroine quickly abandoned one deceased travelling companion, without even the courtesy of checking him for a pulse. While she’s no Lara Croft, I didn’t mind St. John’s performance, and that just about kept me watching. The plot feels like something cribbed from a lesser Bond movie of the time – this may be a positive or a negative, depending how you feel about the Bond movies of the time. But Buono, probably best known as King Tut in the sixties TV version of Batman, chews the scenery in suitably agreeable fashion opposite the heroine. At barely 75 minutes (did they have a lot more commercials in those days?). this can’t be accused of outstaying its welcome, even if 75 minutes more is likely long enough for it to be forgotten again.

Dir: Mel Stuart
Star: Jill St. John, Jed Allan, Victor Buono, Joel Fabiani

Altitudes

  By

★★★
“Climb every mountain…”

I was really surprised to discover that this French film is actually made for television. It has a certain gravitas and thoughtfulness to it, that you rarely find in a genre which is (often rightfully) derided as being formulaic and cliched. This doesn’t escape those criticisms entirely – in particular, there’s a “Disease of the Week” subplot, which does feel as it it might have strayed in from Lifetime or Hallmark. However, even there, it feels handled in a relatively natural manner, rather than being shoehorned in there to elicit sympathy from the viewer. It definitely looks better than most TVMs out of Hollywood. Whether this is down to Félix von Muralt’s cinematography, or simply the stunning Alpine landscapes, is open to debate.

It begins at a funeral. Isabelle Dormann (Borotra) has returned following fifteen years away, after the death of her father, a former mountaineer, who then ran a lodge high in the Alps. This allows her to reconnect with her friend, Kenza (Krey), a world-class climber herself, but also more awkwardly, with Antoine (Stévenin), a man with whom she had a relationship which helped precipitate Isabelle’s sudden departure from the mountains. She decides to honour her father by climbing a new route up Les Roches Brunes, the nearby mountain after which the lodge was called. At 4,357 metres high, it’s the tallest peak in the area, and Isabelle always talked with her father about pioneering a new route up it, to be named for the family.

She and Kenza decide to honour her late father by doing just that. However, it turns out Isabelle is suffering from a neurodegenerative condition, which is slowly but inevitably killing her, making it a race against time before her physical abilities just aren’t there. It seems this is a fight she has lost, as practice sessions don’t go well. Yet after Kenza calls off the attempt, Isabelle decides to strike out on her own for a solo ascent. Kenza and Antoine follow, hoping to save her from herself.

I like films about climbing, when they concentrate on the climbing. Yet, it seems inevitable to tack on personal drama of one kind or another. It’s not enough simply to have one person taking on nature. Too often, they need to have a dead fiance or similar motivation, and the results often tend to resemble bad soap-opera. That’s definitely the case here, with the whole Isabelle-Antoine relationship dramatically overcooked, and muddying the water. The same goes for Isabelle’s condition: she could simply have been not experienced enough to take on the climb. However, when the movie sets such formulaic conceits aside and concentrates on the almost primeval struggle, it’s much more effective. I can’t even dock it significantly for Antoine effectively white-knighting things, since the ending is bittersweet enough to justify it. I think it’s one which will stick in my mind, for longer than it felt it would at the time. 

Dir: Pierre-Antoine Hiroz
Star: Claire Borotra, Déborah Krey, Sagamore Stévenin, Isabelle Caillat
a.k.a. The Climb

Iron Jawed Angels

  By

★★
“Largely unable to get out the vote.”

There’s a fascinating story to be told about the struggle by American women to get the vote. Unfortunately, this isn’t it. Rather than being content to tell the story of the battle and those who fought in it, von Garnier (a German director who gave us Bandits)  seems to want to force these women from the 1910’s into modern feminist configurations. This position is set out particularly clearly in a deliberately anachronistic soundtrack, which at times makes the story feel more like Hamilton. And to be clear, that’s not a good thing. The focus is campaigner Alice Paul (Swank), beginning in 1912 when she returns from England, her passions set on fire by the work there of Emmeline Pankhurst, as documented in the rather better Suffragette.

Alice initially seeks to work with the leading American group, the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, led by Carrie Chapman Catt (Huston), only to find their methods not radical enough for her tastes. This eventually causes her to form her own group, and begin protesting against President Woodrow Wilson, including a daily picket of the White House. Matters come to a head after the United States enters World War I, with such protests being seen as unpatriotic. This leads to Paul and other women being arrested on dubious charges, and after beginning a hunger strike in protest, the women are force-fed. Eventually, Wilson is convinced to support their cause, with the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, being passed in 1920.

My main problem is that Paul never feels an authentic character. She comes over more like a 21st century woman transplanted to the time, which as result, makes her story feel almost like a bad episode from the current incarnation of Doctor Who. It chooses to manipulate history purely for dramatic purposes, such as shoehorning in a romantic relationship with a newspaper cartoonist. Yet for all the obviously liberal credentials inherent in the story, according to the film, only one black woman supported the suffrage movement – and just for a minute or two, before exiting the film. Awkward, that.

Despite the above, and the film in general being a stylistic mess, you’d have to try particularly hard to screw up the underlying story, which is generally an empowering and rousing one. You’d have to be a colder heart than I, not to feel aggrieved by the treatment Paul and the other women suffer in pursuit of their cause, and the film does manage to do these elements justice, simply by reining back in the attempts to jazz things up. I was amused (and slightly pleased) by the disdain of NAWSA towards their bomb-flinging sisters across the Atlantic, who were rather keener on direct action. Though the main moment which amazed me was the scene where President Wilson walked out of the front gate of the White House, tipping his hat to the protestors as he passed them. Truly a different era.

Dir: Katja von Garnier
Star: Hilary Swank, Frances O’Connor, Julia Ormond, Anjelica Huston

Stormy Weathers

  By

★★½
“Scattered outbreaks of interest.”

Within ten seconds of Chris having entered the room when this was on, she asked, “Are you watching Moonlighting?” No, I wasn’t – but it’s certainly a valid question. Just a couple of years earlier, Shepherd had finished off a run playing a private eye alongside Bruce Wills on that highly successful show. And here she is, again playing a private investigator on television, with a fondness for cracking wise and showing off her legs. What are the odds? Well, there’s absolutely no doubt the makers of this knew exactly what they were doing by casting Shepherd. Though I also suspect that they were hoping to ride on the coat-tails of the similar V.I. Warshawski, which came out the previous year. Its commercial failure won’t have helped this, and it feels like a pilot that never got picked up.

Samantha “Don’t call her Stormy” Weathers (Shepherd) takes on the case of dishy Italian aristocrat Gio (Beltran), seeking to discover what happened to his elder brother, who vanished in Los Angeles 15 years previously. Their father died recently, and he needs to establish inheritance. He contacts Sam because her late father, an LAPD homicide cop, had reached out at the time and been told the brother was disowned. It was the last case Weathers Sr. worked there, before quitting the force to start the detective agency. Sam discovers the case seems increasingly likely involved in that decision. With the help of trusty hacker Squirrel (Schlatter) and muckraking journo Bogey (Salinger), she discovers a conspiracy stretching across the years and involving Black Power activists, drug-runners and current high political office.

It’s almost entirely predictable, and if you can’t guess who the bad guy is before the big twist, you haven’t been paying attention. Not that I’d blame you for that, as this is as formulaic as it is obvious. However, it benefits from a strong supporting cast with a lot of familiar faces. I spotted Kurt Fuller (Robocop), Roy Thinnes (The Invaders), Zelda Rubinstein (Poltergeist), Tony Lo Bianco (God Told Me To) and Vonetta McGee (Blacula), and they all provide good service. Shepherd is also solid enough, even if as mentioned, the character seems perilously close to Maddie Hayes.

The action is lightly sprinkled, and feels more like a side-dish than the main course. But there’s a decent sequence where Sam is trailed by two goons, only to lure them into a deserted warehouse and dispatch them with surprisingly ruthless efficiency. There’s also a reasonable about of running around and climbing, which – as the poster suggests – seem to be there as much to show of Sam’s gams, as in furtherance of any elements of the story. It is curiously dated in some aspects, from a time where computers and mobile phones were very much in their infancy. What Squirrel does could basically be done by anyone on Google, and the multiple Terminator 2 references also pin this firmly as a product of 1992. I was never truly bored here: on the other hand, I was never very interested either.

Dir: Will Mackenzie
Star: Cybill Shepherd, Robert Beltran, Charlie Schlatter, Diane Salinger

The Wild Women of Chastity Gulch

  By

★★★
“Civil War of the Sexes”

This sprightly TV movie from 1982 boasts a rather decent cast and, at least in the first half, manages to go in unexpected and interesting direction. It does end up descending into rather familiar territory thereafter, and the finale doesn’t manage to be as rousing as it should be. Yet it managed to keep my interest, and as this genre goes, that probably makes it better than average. It takes place in the last stages of the American Civil War, when the Southern women of Sweetwater have been left bereft of men, after the Confederate Army has recruited them all to their cause. Newly arrived in town is doctor Maggie McCulloch (Barnes), who has arrived to help her ailing aunt, Annie (Collins). She is shocked to discover Annie is less the mine owner touted in her letters, and more the owner of the town brothel.

With the men out of the picture, the local townswomen try to drive Annie and her business out of town, only to find the madam is made of sterner stuff. Such petty grievances are set aside with the arrival of Union forces under Colonel Samuel Isaacs (Duff), who demands Maggie’s services to help his injured son, Frank (former teen heart-throb, Donny Osmond!). Leaving Frank behind to take care of business elsewhere, the Colonel promises to leave the town alone if Frank is saved, though Confederate surgeon John Cain (Horsley) doubts he’ll keep his word. The women of Sweetwater need to be formed into a fighting unit capable of repelling Isaacs and his men if they return with ill intent.

From a modern perspective, perhaps the most unusual thing is seeing the Union soldiers (with the exception of Frank) portrayed as the villains of the piece. These days, the Confederate flag is basically the same thing as the swastika, yet the movie seems perfectly happy to accept that there were basically decent people on both sides. Pointedly, at the end, nobody mentions who won the war, because that’s not important – just that it’s over. Though on the other hand, there is literally not a single non-Caucasian in the entire movie. It’s flat-out impossible to imagine any depiction of the Civil War like this being made nowadays, making it a period piece almost as much as the era it represents.

That aside, the plot unfolds largely as you’d expect. There’s the initial tension between whores and housewives, and the women struggle to come to terms with the everyday business of running the town. For example, there’s a fire drill, which ends up with half the ladies thrashing around in shallow water, and some other slapstick involving whitewash, that is somewhere between lightly amusing and embarrassing. However, Barnes – at the time a sitcom star in Three’s Company – does a very good job of keeping the film grounded, and the supporting cast help admirably in that aspect. Collins is particularly good, projecting an attitude which clearly proclaims she will take no shit from anyone.

Inevitably, there’s the expected romance between Maggie and John, and the latter slowly succeeds in getting the townsfolk from literally falling over when they fire their weapons, to a reasonable degree of competence. On the one hand, it is implausible that civilians could defeat trained and experienced soldiers in a firefight. However, they don’t have to win, just make the situation unpleasant enough the Colonel decides it’s not worth it, and moves on. That perhaps happens rather too quickly, and the film might have benefited from devoting less time to the romantic aspects, in order to give us a more satisfying finale.

Obviously, given the medium, it’s never quite going to be able to live up to a title which feels considerably more “mature viewer” than the content here ever reaches. However, considering the limitations, it wisely concentrates on the dramatic elements, and that’s when it comes admirably close to being, not just a “real movie”, but a good one at that.

Dir: Philip Leacock
Star: Priscilla Barnes, Lee Horsley, Joan Collins, Howard Duff 

Flatbed Annie & Sweetiepie: Lady Truckers

  By

★★½
“Hard to give a truck.”

After her truck-driving husband is injured in an attempted hijack, Sweetiepie (Darby) finds herself in a bind. They’re way behind on payments for the truck, to the point that it’s about to be repossessed by C.W. Douglas (Stanton) of Vehicle Retrievals Incorporated. In desperation, she hires experienced driver Flatbed Annie (Potts) to partner with her, working the necessary delivery routes to pay off their debt. However, Douglas is not the only threat the pair face on the highway. The failed hijack was intended to recover a package which has surreptitiously been placed in the truck during a run to Mexico, and its owners remain very keen to recover their merchandise from the new operators,

It’s a TV movie, so you know that means it’s going to be well short of the necessary wallop, especially considering the late seventies era from which this dates. In reality, the mob would have no hesitation in using more direct methods to take their property back, with Annie and Sweetiepie lucky to escape with their lives. Here, the criminals are bumbling, comedic figures who pose no threat and, in fact, are all but forgotten during the middle stages. It’s also remarkable how Sweetiepie picks up the ability to drive a 16-wheeler in only a few hours, considering she was previously a county clerk. Training. It’s clearly vastly over-rated… Mind you, if you’re looking for vehicular mayhem, you’re in the wrong place anyway: an unnecessary citrus avalanche is about as close as this gets.

On the positive side, the case here is better than you’d expect. You may remember Darby from the original True Grit, and Potts would go on to Ghostbusters. The chief delight though is Stanton, playing a repo man a full five years before his iconic turn as a repo man in… um, Repo Man. His character here is an affable sort, considering his profession, who rarely lets anything faze him, playing the guitar as he drives. Indeed, he’s quite the musical talent, at one point whipping out his harmonica to deliver an impromptu rendition of Scotland the Brave, for no apparent reason. The film comes to life any time he’s on-screen, and if this had spun off into a series (as the ending implies was hoped), I’d have watched.

As a stand-alone entity, however, it only barely passes muster as entertainment. The initial set-up is fine, the problem is a script which has no idea what to do with the scenario beyond reaching its end point. Questions such as how the package came to be in the truck, for example, are glossed over in little more than a single sentence, and that entire subplot is not so much resolved as discarded. There are nods to the brotherhood of the road, with other truckers helping out our heroines, an idea likely borrowed from the previous year’s hit movie, Convoy. Like most other elements here, nothing of more than marginal significance results.

Dir: Robert Greenwald
Star: Kim Darby, Annie Potts, Harry Dean Stanton, Arthur Godfrey

Amy

  By

★★★
“What rules?”

It’s interesting to compare the approach taken in this biopic of aviation heroine Amy Johnson, made in 1984, with the one over 40 years earlier (and shortly after her death) in They Flew Alone, and note the similarities and differences. Both are relatively restrained in budget. The earlier one because it was a low-cost production, made during a war; the later one because it was made for television – and the BBC at that, never a broadcaster known for its profligate spending! As a result, both are limited in terms of the spectacle they can offer, and end up opting to concentrate on Amy as a character. It’s the cheaper approach.

This benefits from a little more distance, and doesn’t need to paint an almost beatific picture of its subject for patriotic propaganda purposes. It begins with Amy (Walter) already fully grown up and seeking to raise funds for her record-setting flight to Australia, despite only a hundred hours of solo experience. Actually, 102, as she points out to a potential sponsor, also delivering the line above. when it’s pointed out she’s not even supposed to be in the hangar. The film does a somewhat better job of capturing Amy in flight, with wing-mounted camerawork that’s an improvement over the obvious rear-projection used in Alone. Yet there’s still too much reliance on newspaper headlines, to avoid having to spend money, though there is some deft use, of what’s either genuine newsreel footage or artfully re-created, sepia facsimiles.

There is a similar focus on her failed marriage to fellow aviator, Jim Mollinson (Francis, who really does not sound Scottish at all), and he doesn’t come off much better than the character did in Alone. Jim is portrayed again as a drunken womanizer, though this version plays down the idea of him becoming fed-up at being overshadowed by Johnson’s exploits. It feels like there’s a slight hint of a romantic relationship between Johnson and earlier co-pilot Jack Humphreys (Pugh). There’s also a statement that she had an operation to prevent her from having children, which I had not heard before. But it does depict Amy as quickly becoming fed up with the endless appearances required by her Daily Mail contract post-Australia flight, which seems accurate: she was happier out of the public eye.

The biggest difference between the two films is probably the way they depict her death. This… simply doesn’t. It ends instead, in a 1940 meeting with her ex-husband, while they were both ferrying planes around Britain for the Air Transport Auxiliary. Barbs are traded, and Jim seems annoyed when a fan comes up seeking Amy’s autograph and ignoring him completely. She leaves for her flight, despite being told regulations won’t let her take off due to the conditions. “What rules?” she says, before a caption details her death in 1941. It’s understated, and that’s in line with the approach taken here – perhaps too much so. While I think it is slightly better than Alone, this feels mostly due to better technical aspects. I still can’t feel either film gave me a true understanding of what she was like, or what made her tick.

Dir: Nat Crosby
Star: Harriet Walter, Clive Francis, George A. Cooper, Robert Pugh

The Lark

  By

★★
“The play’s the thing…”

This was originally a French play, L’Alouette, written by Jean Anouilh in 1952. Three years later, a translated version was brought to Broadway, where it ran for 226 performances from November 1955 until June 1956. Julie Harris played Joan, and there was quite a star-studded cast behind her, including Boris Karloff as Bishop Cauchon, Christopher Plummer and Theodore Bikel. It was critically acclaimed, Harris winning that year’s Tony Award as Best Leading Actress, and Karloff being nominated as Best Leading Actor. The following February, a TV adaptation was screened in the United, though wasn’t the first or the last such. In November 1956, the BBC screened their version, with Hazel Penwarden as Joan, and a supporting cast including Michael Caine. Additionally, 1958 saw an Australian version, though it seems notable only for having Olivia Newton-John’s father in the cast.

Neither of those versions appear to have survived, while a low-resolution version of the US one has, probably a Kinescope recording. It was part of the long-running “Hallmark Hall of Fame” series, and was broadcast on January 10, 1957. This explains the adverts before, after and during the intermission, for Hallmark products, in particular related to Valentine’s Day! Harris and Karloff reprised their roles from Broadway, with Plummer being replaced in the role of Warwick by Elliott, and Wallach as the Dauphin. It begins with Joan’s trial, the events leading up to that point being told in flashback, including the usual things such as her visions, encounter with the Dauphin, etc.

Although not a “live” transmission, this is very much a recording of a stage play, and that’s likely the biggest problem here. Treading the boards requires a different style of acting, with emotions needing to be projected to reach the back of audience. There are no close-ups on stage. Harris had film experience (being Oscar nominated in 1952 for The Member of the Wedding), and would go on to win 11 Emmys, as well as being one of the Hallmark Hall of Fame’s most frequent leading ladies, Here, however, it feels as if she didn’t adapt her performance here for the small screen, and as a result it comes over as rather shrill and almost hysterical. I wonder if Milla Jovovich used this portrayal as a template in The Messenger? It didn’t work there either.

The supporting cast fair better. Elliott in particular comes over as a genuinely nasty piece of work – there’s no question about where the play’s sympathies lie. But there’s no getting away from this version’s origins as a play, with basically nothing in the way of action worth mentioning. To use a good old British turn of phrase, “it’s all mouth and no trousers,” and the chat doesn’t add anything of significant to our knowledge about the character of Joan. To some extent, it’s less the fault of the program makers than the nature of TV at the time. It was still struggling to establish its own identity, in ways that would take advantage of the format. Underwhelming reproductions of other media were clearly not the answer.

Dir: George Schaefer
Star: Julie Harris, Boris Karloff, Denholm Elliott, Eli Wallach

Stressed to Death

  By

★½
“Definitely a stress test.”

The concept here is intriguing. It’s just the execution – and the script in particular – which is bad. A robbery at a convenience store ends in the death of David, the husband to Victoria Garrett (Aldrich). She blames the paramedic on the scene, former soldier Maggie Hart (Holden), for the loss of her spouse, though the incident hits Maggie equally hard. She quits her job, raising daughter Jane (Blackwell) with her husband, commercial real-estate agent, Jason (Gerhardt). But Victoria hasn’t moved on – in probably the film’s most memorably loopy elements, she feeds her husband’s ashes to a pot-plant she calls David, to which she chats. She’s also clearly a believer in that saying about revenge being served cold.

For she waits a whole ten years after the incident, before putting into motion a plan for revenge, hiring a pair of thugs to kill Maggie’s family in front of her. Fortunately for her target, they’re two blithering incompetents – or maybe the script just makes it seem like they were acquired through the ‘Help Wanted’ section of Facebook Marketplace. Adding spice to the situation, she has hired Jason as her subordinate, and Jane turns out to have a crush on Victoria’s son. Complicating matters further is Maggie’s PTSD, which is naturally the movie-friendly version, only kicking in when required by the plot. It can also apparently be cured by violent trauma: specifically, someone hiring a pair of thugs to kill your family in front of you. What are the odds?

Even by the low standards of Lifetime movies, this is bad. It’s not just the script that is sloppy, the production includes a bike helmet suddenly appearing on Jane’s head, and a knife that teleports from the floor into Maggie’s hands. But let’s not kid ourselves: it’s mostly the script. I lost count of the points at which I sighed heavily. Probably peak sigh was achieved at the sequence where Maggie and Jane have been captured. The thug doesn’t just leave them alone, he falls asleep in the next room, allowing them to escape. Guess that whole thugging thing really takes it out of you. Worse, after the mother and daughter get away, they show no urgency at all, wandering around while chatting casually about Jane’s crush. Oh, look: they get caught. Again.

This all builds to a ridiculous excuse for a climax in a motel room, which ends with the police describing what happened to the chief thug. The only things that saves this from total disaster are performances generally better than the story deserves. Holden, in particular, does a decent job with her character, and actually, the chief thug is surprisingly sympathetic, when telling Maggie about his abused childhood. Or something. I expected better from Brian Skiba, an Arizona native who co-wrote this, and whose films Chokehold and .357: Six Bullets for Revenge have previously been reviewed here. While they weren’t great, they look like Oscar-winners beside Stressed to Death. I think I’m the one coming down with a case of PTSD after sitting through this.

Dir: Jared Cohn
Star: Gina Holden, Taylor Blackwell, Sarah Aldrich, Jason Gerhardt