★★
“Snow up to much…”
Though not formally listed on the IMDb as a made for television movie, it has all the hallmarks of one, down to what look suspiciously like pauses into which commercial breaks could be inserted. It’s the story of work colleagues, Liz Bartlett (Schnarre) and Barbara Tate (Eleniak). The former is attacked in the company’s parking garage one night, and confesses to her friend that her former husband is stalking her. She fears for her life, having helped put him behind bars. So what is the most sensible thing for the pair to do in these circumstances? If your answer is, “Head off to a remote mountain cabin, in the middle on an impending blizzard”, give yourself two points.
Unsurprisingly, this does not work out well, and you can more or less tell where this is going, from the moment when the cabin’s host says “The owner was very specific about this: do not go into the gun cabinet, it’s in the lease.” Liz and Barbara will be getting a two-star review on their profile, because you should not be in the slightest bit shocked to hear, they do end up going into the gun cabinet. For it’s not long before sketchy characters start harassing Barbara in town, and we also learn that Liz was considerably less than forthcoming with the truth to her supposed BFF. This isn’t a surprise – at least, to the viewer – since we had previously seen her take a case of “camera equipment” on the trip, which we know actually contains a gun and a large amount of cash.
It’s all very much by the numbers, the overall vanilla flavour not helped by two leads who manage to look somewhat pretty, while creating almost nothing approaching memorable characters. Heck, I’d have settled for a depth roughly approximating the alleged snowfall. I say “alleged”, since considering there’s a supposed blizzard in action, sealing them off from the rest of civilization, I’m not sure I actually saw a single flake fall from the sky over the duration of the entire movie. It takes about an hour for Barbara to catch up to what we the audience already knows, and for the ex-husband to appear at the cabin.
Things do get at least somewhat interesting thereafter, with Barbara being forced into steps significantly outside of her comfort zone, in order to stay alive from those in pursuit of her. She’s helped by the fact that the pursuer may not exactly be the sharpest tool in the box, and engages in acts which certainly end up back-firing on them. It’s still all low-impact stuff generally, and not enough to distract you from Eleniak’s resemblance here to a slightly less wholesome version of Meg Ryan. Don’t expect anything along “those” lines either; again, I strongly suspect this was intended for Lifetime, rather than late-night on Cinemax. I’ve already forgotten about it, and feel no great sense of loss thereof.
Dir: Ruben Preuss
Star: Erika Eleniak, Monika Schnarre, Peter Dobson, Bill Mondy


Carla (Williams) and her boyfriend Daniel (Davis) are all set for a nice weekend in the mountains. Unfortunately, the snowmobile trip runs into difficulty, in particular coming in the shape of a pair of cartel assassins. What, you may ask, are a pair of cartel assassins doing half-way up a snowy mountain in [I’m guessing] the Colorado Rockies? Good question. I’m glad you asked. They are after a robber who made the ill-advised decision to rob a bar which was a front for their organization. He’s now hiding out, half-way up the aforementioned snowy mountain, in the belief he’s safe. Turns out not to be the case.
At the age of fifteen, Madison Michaels saw her prostitute mother beaten and killed by Renegade (Cross), a vicious local pimp. His homicide goes unpunished. Ten years later, Madison (Linton) is a counsellor, trying to help drug addicts and hookers get off the streets. She discovers that Renegade is still abusing women, and gets no help from the police, with Detective Straker (Williams) saying he can do nothing based on her hearsay. Against the advice of her friends and sister Lydia (Jeffries), Madison hatches a plan to take the pimp down, and clean the streets of thus piece of scum. Naturally, it doesn’t initially go quite as planned, with the trap set for Renegade backfiring, followed by betrayal from an unexpected direction.
I went into this braced for it to be terrible, having sat through the same film-makers’, largely irredeemable
This is one where you need to take the era into account. Made in 1957, this was based on a short story from a couple of years earlier: “Petticoat Brigade” by Chester William Harrison. It’s very much an Audie Murphy movie – and understandably so, since the man was a bona fide hero, being one of the most-decorated American combat soldiers in World War II, before he became an actor. But the fifties was not a decade known for strong, independent female characters in Hollywood Westerns. We’ve covered a few:
We’ve written about Griselda Blanco before. In particular, we reviewed telenovela La Viuda Negra, which was loosely based on her life and
To my pleasant surprise, that’s not the case at all. Obviously, there’s a certain allure here, but it doesn’t needlessly glamourize or condemn its subject, and instead manages to do a good job of painting both sides, and depicting Griselda as a surprisingly complex character. This is particularly clear at the end, when her youngest son – named, amusingly, Michael Corleone – says of his mother, “Yes, it’s a legacy of violence. But she was a woman that had to become savage in a world that wasn’t made for her.” Then Detective Diaz, who headed the Miami task force charged with bringing her down, counters, “We have this bitch from hell who decides she wants to be meaner and more powerful than anybody else… Violence. Arrogance. Greed.
This one does take a while to reach the necessary threshold: probably only truly qualifies for the final twenty minutes or so, though it does talk a good game until that point. Also, it’s a decent enough combination of Western and home-invasion genres to that point, to pass muster. Nothing special, mind you. It just knows its limitations and is careful enough to work within them. It takes place in the Old West. whee Beth (Bernadette) and her twin children, Brian and Irene (Betsy) now live with her new husband, Robert (Krause). The trio appear to have escaped an abusive relationship, and it’s not long after a railroad surveyor pays a visit, before Irene is cheerfully telling him, she’s going to go back and kill her father some day.
Director LaBute is best known around these parts for his ill-conceived remake of classic horror The Wicker Man, which is generally regarded as spectacularly bad, and is probably best-known for spawning memes involving Nicolas Cage and bees. So expectations going into this were… not high, shall we say. On that basis, the three-star rating is something of a pleasant surprise, though most of the credit for this should got to its star, rather than the director. Tess (Q) is a veteran of the war in Iraq, who is struggling to reconnect to her two sisters. Rose is getting married, and is nice enough that Tess is willing to attend her bachelorette party at the family cabin, deep in the country. But Beth (Foster) is a straight-up bitch.
By coincidence, I watched this not longer after the not very good
I was going to go with “Tree’s company” as the tagline, before I realized I’ve actually used that in three separate, forest-set movies. So I decided to adjust it slightly, and what’s above is indeed very apt. There is a cast of three (3) and the entire thing unfolds in the woods. There isn’t a single set or interior shot in the whole film. Indeed, if you’d asked me, I’d have said this had all the hallmarks of a COVID-era project, designed to be shot with a small cast and in a nicely sanitary, outdoor location. Not so, even though Tubi dates it as 2020. There was a screening in April 2019, well before anyone had heard of Wuhan, and the IMDb gives it a year of 2017.