“Enjoy the world we live in,” the title card instructs, in German, at the beginning of this jaw-droppingly deranged pic that comes across as a mixture of Jean-Luc Goddard’s Weekend and Russ Meyer’s Up!  It may take several attempts to figure out what the hell is going on, but its frenetic pace and non-stop outrageousness make it a pleasure.
The story begins with the amazingly bloody slaughter of a social worker (“Three Month Fever” author Indiana) and capture of a Polish immigrant family he’s supposed to be bringing to a refugee camp in Rassau.  Rassau’s inhabitants, especially the town sheriff/furniture store owner and a crazed priest (Kier at his best), it seems, don’t want any new additions because it’s an intrusion on the master race.
Yes, it’s Nazi-time again, but never before has a Nazi-laden film been pulled off with such wit (both lowbrow and high) and style.  The terribly unsympathtic and frequently hysterical film includes extended splatter, a foppish Nazi leader, a woman masturbating in tears while watching a transvestite get beaten, a stuntman smashing his head open on a billboard, and a sound clip of the Apollo Moon Landing(!?)… and that’s just the first twenty minutes!  Helpful narration desperately tries to keep the plot semi-coherent.  Anyone who thinks German cinema today ends with Run, Lola, Run should be advised to check out Terror 2000, which at times feels like a John Waters film without the sanity.

Alejandro Amenabar has been called “the Spanish Hitchcock,” and while it seems odd to have a reputation as a director based on two films released in the U.S. (the other being Open Your Eyes), that certainly seems to be the direction he’s headed.  Made before Open Your Eyes and released on video only after that film get some acclaim, Thesis is a taught, good-looking thriller, if not exactly big in the originality department.
Ana Torrent (one of the two little girls in Spirit of the Beehive!) plays Angela, a college student working on the title object, an exploration into what motivates people to want to see violence as entertainment.  Her professor, attempting to assist her, stumbles upon a snuff film located in the school’s archives and promptly croaks from a heart attack.  Angela finds the film herself, and with the help of mondo film fanatic Martinez (who bares a striking resemblance to American Movie’s Mark Borchardt here), she’s off to figure out the tape’s origins.
It’s really a rather typical thriller, but Amenabar throws out enough twists and plot complications to make things interesting, if not exactly fresh.  Amanda is a fascinating character herself, coming off less as a standard movie heroine and more a woman driven by her own repulsion.  She listens to the tape’s audio first, recording it and playing it on her walkman over and over in bed(!) before actually viewing the torture.  Unlike Joel Schumacher’s dingy-yet-wimpy 8mm, we actually see the tape, and, in fact, it stays central to the plot.
Not wanting to give too much away, I’ll just say that the film has a good, tense score complimenting the many suspenseful scenes.  The characters are, true to form, not quite what they appear to be (or are they? Etc.), and the film has multiple climaxes, two of which feature our heroine being tied up in a manner of the snuff victim.
While Thesis isn’t as dark as it could have been, nor does it really add anything new to a tried and true formula, it's an entertaining thriller with several surprises.  Ana Torrent shines in her role, and the cinematography is as complimentary to the piece as it was in Open Your Eyes.  It doesn’t take itself seriously enough to be any more than an above-average mystery, but what it does, it does well.

Movies featuring pinball and video games are always high on my list of cultural timepieces (though I’m still looking for a copy of Greydon Clark’s Joysticks), so how could I resist a pinball movie starring Brooke Shields?  Obviously, I couldn’t, and while Tilt is overlong at almost two hours, it’s still a perfectly entertaining piece of stupidity.
Our story begins with Neil, a pinball hustler (Krull’s Ken Marshall, the Patrick Swayze of his time) and his weasely buddy (John Crawford) trying to win a game against The Whale, played by a constantly eating Charles Durning, who’s constantly shot in perspectives to make him look even larger than he already is.  Even flies buzz around him!  Their cheating ways are found out, and they decide to go to L.A. to pursue a music career(!?) where they meet the title character, a jailbait pinball wizard played by Shields.  She’s called Tilt because she never tilts.  (“Nothin’ in life makes sense,” explains the sole black character, er, Jamaica, when asked for an explanation)  When Neil realizes his career is going nowhere (no big surprise, really--his music consists entirely of awful love ballads that would make Neil Diamond choke), he dumps the weasely guy and teams up with Tilt.  The two begin pinball hustling across the nation, culminating in, you guessed it, a re-match with The Whale.
In between all the pinball footage, lousy music and lag time, there’s bit parts by Geoffrey Lewis (truck driver who throws Tilt out after she suggests that she sleep with his wife(!)), Fred Ward (hustle victim) and Don Stroud.  There’s even an annoying stuttering character named Replay.
Rudy Durand  wrote, directed and produced this piece of work, but the screenplay was co-written with Donald Cammell, the director of Performance, Wild Side and White of the Eye (which are all recommended to varied degrees).  The producers obviously saved money by using the same music over and over until you want to personally strangle the band playing “Pinball... that’s all.”  The White Men Can’t Jump of pinball movies.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1986, I was 11 years old.  As a sixth grader, I probably should have been too old to be playing with Transformers, but I'd been into them since I bought my first figure at 9.  That figure was Huffer, and in my own extended storyline that connected all of my action figures (including Go-Bots, Change-a-Bots and all the other dimestore 2/$5 crap I'd managed to accumulate), I'd explained the loss of his lead and legs as the result of a nuclear blast, and his head was safely kept in electronic storage for advice.
So despite the hot summer of film that 1986 was (including Aliens and Howard the Duck), I was most excited about Transformers: The Movie.  My best friend Gilbert and I saw it opening week (it wasn't around for much longer than that) with his father, and it blew me away.  I left the theater convinced I'd seen the greatest movie ever made.
I was wrong, of course.  I wouldn't see the greatest movie ever made until eleven years later, when Species II would wow the nation with its dazzling display of intelligent science fiction and superior storytelling.  At the time, however, T:TM was the shit, a word I remember gasping when I heard it come from the lips of Spike.  An animated character, a respected one on a daily show no less, had sworn!  My brain was blown.
Not to mention all the plot twists that had already convinced me that this was no ordinary kid's flick.  Not only did they kill off several Transformers, but they destroyed Optimus Prime, re-formed Megatron with the voice of Mr. Spock, blew away Starscream, introduced Spike's son and set the entire next season 20 years in the future! Years later, X-Files: Fight the Future pulled a similar trick, except that nothing happened in the movie and the series pretty much went on unchanged.
While it was released on video later that year, and while it still maintained a mystical allure for Gilbert and I, the FHE release was a different cut.  The PG rating was gone, and Spike's explitive was no longer audible.  Curiously, Ultra Magnus' exclamation "Open, dammit, open!" was still there.  Go figure.
In the years that passed, Transformers: The Movie slowly became an almost mystical film for a generation of fanboys.  FHE stopped making the tape after the trend had worn thin, and while a cheap, EP-mode AVID release in the late 80's made it a little more accessable, the film remained a tough find.  The movie began to get better and better in most nostalgic minds as they hopelessly began to search out a video store that still had a copy for rent.  The SP mode version became a Holy Grail of video collectors--both valued and rare.
When we got the red clamshell-cased Rhino cassette at work, I was excited.  For the first time in years, I'd no longer have to look at customers sympathetically when they asked about it and shrug, "No, it's unavailable."  When I was the PG rating on the cover sleeve, I immediately ran to the back room to process the tape.  My childhood had returned.

Tragically, the Rhino release is not the PG-rated theatrical cut, but the same version that FHE put out in '87.  Still, it's great that it is available again, and the clamshell box looks great.  Of course, the movie itself...
The movie is weird.
I pick on Pokemon: The First Movie because its incestuous continuity makes it virtually impossible to follow without a degree in Pokemonology, but Transformers: The Movie is the same way.  It's hard to imagine Orson Welles, Robert Stack or Eric Idle even trying to figure out what the hell their dialogue was supposed to mean.  Hell, I'd be willing to bet that Peter Cullen (voice of Optimus Prime) even had problems.
The animation is pretty standard, though it is slightly better than the TV series and the artwork itself is quite good.  But what kind of kid's movie kills off the most beloved character of all--in the first half-hour?  All the lousy 80's metal in the world (and T:TM does its share in trying to get all of it, believe me) can't disguise the fact that the movie is a pretty morbid affair, violent, cynical and morose, the kind that would probably give a littler kid nightmares.
Okay, so the dialogue sucks, the plot is confusing, the characters are hard to tell apart if you're not involved with the series.  Say what you will, T:TM is still the best movie ever made from a toy-centric cartoon.  After all, I don't see anyone clammoring for a re-release of Go-Bots: Battle of the Rock Lords.

I grew up around science fiction conventions, attending at least two or three a year until my mid-teens, and continue to be around the edges of sci-fi fandom to this day. In this time I’ve managed to come in contact with a fair number of folks like those documented in Roger Nygard’s Trekkies.  It’s an interesting piece of work, though it seems a bit unsure whether it wants to wallow in Waiting For Guffman-esque pathetic hilarity or respect these fans for their choice of idol worship.
Host (and co-executive producer) Denise Crosby takes us into the bowels of a Star Trek convention, curiously omitting the idea that there are other sci-fi cons that take themselves just as seriously, showing interviews with some of the seemingly immortal Star Trek concept’s more rabid fans interspersed with Trek cast members talking about their experiences.  Among the film’s more bizarre sights are a table of normal looking people screaming at each other in Klingon, a Trekkie in drag giving an example of filking, a Trek-themed dental facility, and a 50-year old man in full regalia announcing “It’s more than just a casual thing, I’m really into it,” without a hint of irony as he shows the viewer his elaborate “Trek Room.”  The highlight, however, is the interview with Barbara Adams, made famous by wearing her Federation uniform to jury duty.
It’s all a bit creepy, sure, but Nygard (director of the above-average Michael Rooker vehicle Back to Back) does allow the subjects to rationalize their behavior, explaining the favorable ethics the show projects.  The phenomena also gets a fair comparison to sports freaks, who also wear the costumes of their heroes around but do so without ridicule.  (This probably has something to do with the fact that the average sports enthusiast could beat the average Trekkie to a pulp in a second.  Curiously, most sports fans are also pathetic Star Wars fans, a more socially acceptable form of geekdom.)  When several subjects give conflicting ideas on the “Trekkie vs. Trekker” controversy, you can’t help but stare slack-jawed in amazement.
Several stand-out bits with the Trek cast make this must viewing.  James Doohan gets near tears when talking about a young female fan that sent him a suicide note, and Crosby’s reaction to finding out that a couple’s dressing up as Trek characters (Tasha Yar included) enhances their sex life is priceless.  There’s also a bit on the fairly disturbing Kirk/Spock slash fiction, and journeys to Riverside, Iowa, future birthplace of James T. Kirk.
The tone of the movie is at times scatter-shot so you don’t quite know if you’re supposed to be laughing at these people or not.  Near the end, however, when a Trekkie describes an annual party that’s “getting better every year.  This year we had a girl come and everything,” even the most accepting of fanboys would join the rest of the world in hoping these people would just get laid.  While a bit overlong (it would have been an ideal hour-long documentary), Trekkies is on par with Fast, Cheap and Out of Control in the realm of fascinating portraits of human obsessiveness.
(The website for Trekkies is worth a look itself, filled with info and reviews from the media, fans and participants.)

In all my surveying of literature on bad movies, very little has been written about Troll II.  Most simply dismiss it as an awful film and move on, while Michael Weldon at least acknowledging that is has “some of the worst acting ever.”  While this is certainly true, I think Troll II reaches that sort of car-wreck awfulness that makes it must viewing.
The plot follows young Josh as his family takes a trek to the village of, er, Nilbog (it’s helpfully pointed out that this is “Goblin” spelled backwards) as part of a house-exchange program.  The town is, natch, overrun by goblins (not, as would be assumed from the title, trolls) intent on making the family into one of their own.
The acting is, as reported, too unbelievable to be described in any English language.  Perhaps if, like the actors, I spoke sentences I learned in Dutch phonetically off a script written by someone who’d never actually spoken a word of English out loud, or had never read a script with any dialogue, I could put it across, but somehow I doubt it.  Most, nay, all porn I’ve ever seen has featured more talented performers.  This alone would make this worth a look.  The exception to this is Deborah Reed, who plays a witch, who overacts so severely everyone else, already a comatose group of zombies, seems to be acting backward.
Anyway, after arriving at Nilbog (nnngh), the family treats themselves to what’s on the dining room table, an assortment of foods all painted a flourescent green.  Our group, who’ve now reached a level of lethargy barely above that of your average heroin addict, are too out-of-it to notice, and the ghost of the kid’s grandfather shows up, stops time(!) and makes the kid jump up on the table and piss on everyone’s plates(!!) in order to save them.
At this point, the father “tightens his belt one loop so he won’t suffer from hunger pains.”
Then, the sister’s boyfriend, who’s been following them in his camper with some friends, shows up and meets the witch, who turns him into a tree and—no, I can’t go on.  Needless to say, it only gets worse, down to costumes (the goblins themselves are significantly more human than Ron Perlman in The Name of the Rose) and special effects that make you shake your head with disbelief that not only was this shot on film, but that it was released on video through Columbia/TriStar, for chrissakes.  The death of Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a shame, if for no other reason than they didn’t get their chance to expose the world to this 99-minute endurance test.  Of course, it has nothing to do with the original Troll, which wasn't very good, but at least it was made by human beings.  If only this was a musical, it would be the worst movie ever made.

 
This and The Runner are the first “Blockbuster Exclusive” titles I’ve reviewed here for several reasons.  For one, the exclusive policy is unfair to indie retailers that already can’t compete with the Big Blue’s deals with the studios that only put them out a few bucks a tape.  Secondly, with only a few exceptions (Lyne’s Lolita, The Curve and The Passion of Ayn Rand being the most notable), the product has been interchangable cable movie fare, usually bland romantic comedies or “true-life” dramas that might as well all have the same title.  (“The Truth About Lying,” for example, is a horrible title that could just as well be a new forgettable Alicia Silverstone movie.)
No, I couldn’t possibly pass up seeing The Truth About Lying simply because it’s one of the last released films featuring Roddy McDowall.  I’ll watch anything with McDowall, not just because I think he’s a great screen presence, but because he’s the first celebrity I ever met.  In 1992, he was doing a book signing for the latest installment of his books of photography, and, being a fan already, I had to go meet him.  Not being able to afford to buy the book (I was a struggling Freshman in college), I bought a copy of the premiere of “Night Gallery” to take along in hopes of getting his signature.  Since that silver-inked box has stood in my collection, I’m a sucker for a Roddy film.
Unfortunately, The Truth About Lying is pretty bland stuff, albeit peppered with a fine cast.  Ritter stars as a true crime writer whose police detective aunt (Eggar, in a similar role as Honor Blackman in the recent Tale of the Mummy) tips him off to a juicy new case involving a kidnapped baby. With the help of his daughter (who’s upset that he and her mom aren’t getting back together, which, of course, they end up doing at the end) he gets involved, interviewing those involved.  The suspects include the baby’s mother (“Alien Nation”’s Scarabeli), the father, the father’s mistress (Zuniga), the nanny and the family lawyer, played finely by McDowall.
The typically TV-movie feel of the thing could probably be overcome, and, indeed, the cast does a fine job, but they can’t really do anything about the fact that these characters are so lame.  Why does he have to be a reluctant crime writer trying to retire?  It’s an annoying plot device, used solely to drag out the plot and allow lots of endless conversation between him and his daughter, and really, if he is really soooo not interested, why would he end up with the case?  Why can’t he be a career-minded go-getter with a quick wit, a passion for the game, and a spunky sidekick in his daughter?  It’s be much more interesting to watch a character that genuinely enjoys himself than the same old “I’m just trying to get out of this torrid business” sort of crap.
Okay, so The Truth About Lying isn’t a bad film.  Allan A. Goldstein directed several decent B-movies, including the inventive sci-fier Synapse, the above-par Brian Bosworth contagion flick Virus and the Brad Dourif starrer Common Bonds, and his talents do show.  But it never really rises above anything beyond vaguely interesting, neither dark enough to be fascinating or energetic enough to be fun.  It’s good to see McDowall, and he’s used well, but really, he’s just part of a blandness that stinks of TV-movie quickie possibly inspired by the JonBenet Ramsey case.

 

Rosie Perez has gotten a bad rap.  Since most of the roles she's most known for have consisted of loads of spunky, high-pitched squealing with words attached to resemble a Brooklyn accent, it's not well known that Perez can talk like a normal person.
In The 24 Hour Woman, the new film by Nancy Savoca (helmer of the excellent Dogfight), Perez plays Grace, a daytime talk show producer whose pregnancy is announced on the air by her husband (Ecuadorian hunk Diego Serrano) and his bubble-headed co-host (a perfectly cast Karen Duffy).  The film's loose structure follows approximately two years in Grace's life, and her frustration in dealing with both her newborn daughter and her fledgling career.
At the beginning of the film, Grace gets a new assistant, a mother returning to work after four years, played by Secrets and Lies' Marianne Jean-Baptiste.  By following her as well, Savoca manages to display two different types of working mother--one, a new mother able to afford a nanny, and the other with a husband to look after the slightly older children.
The nearly all-female cast also includes Patti Lupone as Grace's boss, a career-driven, usually angry gal who, while getting a good dose of scenery-chewing in, never descends into caricature.  Jerry Springer shows up briefly ina bit of self-parody.
While the film's meandering plotline may be a turn-off to some, it's hard to resist its' charms.   The ending, however, in which most of the cast runs around the studio in drag(!) seems a bit climactic considering the otherwise nonstandard pacing, and some of the TV show segments are too obviously played for laughs, but these are really minor quibbles.  For each display of children as being cute, there's an equal turn of kids as irritants that get in the way of the life the parents had before their birth, a fairness that most other films of this type choose to ignore.   It'll probably be accused of being a "chick flick," which it is, but only as much as say, Good Will Hunting is a "guy flick."
The 24 Hour Woman is funny and never overly sentimental, and serves as an excellent counterpart of Savoca's earlier exploration into marriage, True Love.  Ignore the box description ("She's sassy!  She's sexy!".. nngh) and check it out, even if you've never really been sold on the allure of Rosie Perez.

The psycho role has quickly become a standard acting gig for those who were popular as youngsters a decade ago but lacked the versatility to maintain a steady career into adulthood.  Witness Judd Nelson in Relentless, Molly Ringwald in Malicious or Andrew McCarthy in Dream Man.  The latest release in this trend is Under Pressure, featuring a whispering, glaring, Bible-spouting Charlie "We'll call you Charles when you're in a decent movie again" Sheen.
The plot is your basic stalker film--nice family of four lives next to Lyle,  a creepy psycho, but nobody believes he's nuts because he's a firefighter and media hero.  The trouble begins when Lyle confronts her kids for being "brats" and suggesting they spend a weekend with him in order "get some discipline."  He also rolls dad's car down the street because it's in front of his house (Apparently the family isn't big on parking brakes) and confronts the mom and kids while brandishing a knife after the son flies a remote controlled plane through his window.  Mom Mare Winningham tries desperately to control things as Lyle freaks out endlessly, staring directly into the camera, having bad dreams, smashing his mirror, and doing all the things movie psychos generally do.
Thankfully, there are a few strong points for a change.  The underrated Winningham is fine, and the family comes off as a believable unit, the police, including John Ratzenberger, don't act like total idiots for once, and the kids aren't particularly grating.  Character-wise, this had the makings of an above-average time-passer.
But then there's Lyle.
What separates good stalker movies like The Stepfather or Bad Influence from bad ones like, say, almost every thriller with a former cast member of "Twin Peaks" are the psychos themselves, and Lyle is about as poorly-conceived a loon as you can get.  It's not all Sheen's fault, though his endless, humorless, always-turned-on psycho personality becomes tiresome rather quickly.  Sheen wasn't really given anything to work with--the character is not only psychotic, but he's a) a wife-beater, b) a child-beater, c) a religious nut, d) an anti-drug nut and e) a racist, none of which, of course, is ever explained or has to do with any of his other weird quirks.  He's such an overt creep that you don't see how anyone, much less the media, could be the least bit charmed by his personality for even a moment.
The film looks good and has an occasional tense moment, but the best bits are stolen from other movies (Lyle carving the word "LOVE" into his mirror doesn't quite rank with Robert Mitchum's tattoos in Night of the Hunter, for example).  All in all, passable fare for a desperate evening, but you may begin to wonder what such a nice bunch of believable characters are doing sharing screen time with such a blatantly stereotypical movie psycho.  It premiered on HBO.

THE VERSACE MURDER (1998)
D: Menahem Golan. Franco Nero, Steven Bauer, Shane Perdue, Matt Servitto, David Wolfson, Oscar Torres, Dania Deville. (Ariztical)

After such forgettable B-fare as Hit the Dutchman and the Michael Pare actioner Deadly Heroes, Menahem Golan makes a welcome return to ambulance-chasing form in this, er, fact-based telling of serial killer Andrew Cunanan.  The story’s climax is, of course, the title event, and before such things can happen we’ve got over an hour of Cunanan and Versace recreation footage, all punctuated by an irritating detective (Bauer) on Cunanan’s trail.
As is to be expected from Golan’s work (see also The Apple), we’ve got a decent actor slumming in a lead role where he’s expected to do little (Nero, who spends most of his screen time walking from place to place), endless shots of nothing happening and pathetic dialogue delivered on the earliest usable take.  The quick-fix screenplay allows for such gapingly obvious cliches as Cunanan's turning on the radio just in time to hear a special bulletin about him and brilliant dialogue like "People don't know me.  They think they do, but they don't."  Cunanan's bedroom is geared up in pathetic leather gear, a subject that's quickly dismissed, and the music would seem more welcome in an Italian zombie film.
Adding to all of this is the whole gay aspect of the film.  Golan, obvious to the fact that the movie he was making was pure exploitation, didn’t seem to want people to think he was “anti-gay,” so the detective is given a seemingly infinite amount of lines in support of gay lifestyles.  While some of the characters’ sexualities are, surprisingly enough, played off without note, the punctuation of “It’s Okay to be Gay” repeated over and over destroys any chance this film had of being decent exploitation fare.
If that wasn’t enough to destroy the film, however, Shane Perdue, cast as Cunanan, would have done the job with ease.  A no-name actor in his first film (he thankfully hasn’t poisoned celluloid since), Perdue’s mincing, screeching, almost phonetically-read portrayal of Cunanan is one of the worst performances in a lead role in any feature film released in years, and he comes off not as the suave, likable liar that Gary Indiana describes in the recommended Three-Month Fever, but more like the sort of creepy howling leather queen you’d leave a bar completely for if you met.  Nero looks bored throughout, and Bauer’s never really done much more than stare and smirk, and doesn’t seem interested in expanding his range here.
It all ends, unbelievably, with our cops at Cunanan's gravesite, commenting on the nature of celebrity while shaking their heads at the numberous fashion-victim girls mourning him.  Quick cash-in attempts don’t have to be awful (In the Line of Duty: Ambush at Waco and The Guyana Tragedy, for example), but once again, Menahem Golan proves he’s a profiteer first and a producer second.  Director doesn’t even make the top ten.

WARLOCK III: THE END OF INNOCENCE (1999)
D: Eric Freiser.  Bruce Payne, Ashley Laurence, Angel Boris, Paul Francis.  (Trimark)

Bruce Payne has always been making his living being a poor man’s Julian Sands.  In his most visible roles, like Passenger 57, he’s obviously playing roles that Sands turned down, undoubtedly because he had some other piece of crap to appear in.  As if to emphasize this point, Trimark has cast him as the replacement Warlock in the third chapter of what was never really a very good franchise to begin with.
Pretty much eschewing the mythos of the first two films, the third Warlock is essentially a re-working of 1988’s useless guilty pleasure Demon Wind, albeit with the pleasure removed. Hellraiser vet Ashley Laurence stars as a young college student (Grad student, surely—she’s got to be in her mid-30’s by now) who inherits a huge empty house due to the fact that she’s the last in her family line.  She and five of her relatively interchangable friends go to check it out, and lo and behold, it seems she’s the key to being back the kingdom of hell on Earth.  Major Payne ensues.
Payne’s performance is the first problem, and it seems to stem from a lack of following Sands.  In the first two films, Sands’ warlock was a smirking, mean-spirited hellspawn of vengeance, someone who’d slit your throat in a second but making sure you’d been properly made a fool of.  Payne’s portrayal is bland, a standard demon with little sense of morbid humor and virtually no sense of being a dangerous son of Satan.  He simply seems terribly bored through the entire film, and thus, so are we.
Typical stuff, sure, but with a degree of style or imagination it can be pulled off with some fair entertainment value.  Co-writer/director Eric Freiser will have none of that however, scraping the bottom of the barrel for horror film cliches like goofy “nightmarish” mirror images, Shining-esque cutaways of events that happened in the house years before, and, worst of all, an old woman at the front gate yelling “Death’s in that house!”  It’s all played without the slightest degree of irony, so unintentional comic moments can be had, but the leaden pacing doesn’t even make it worth suffering through for those brief thrills.
Sure, the special effects aren’t bad, and some of the deaths are imaginative, but the plot twists are strictly paint-by-numbers, and the ending, where the Warlock’s powers inexplicably seem to vanish whenever it’s time for our heroine to get some licks in, reeks of a hatchet job.  We really don’t need another horror film where a pot-smoker blames some eerie happening on his drug, and Warlock III doesn’t really have anything left to offer.  (Note to writers: marijuana is not a hallucinogen.)

 
Normally I’ll write my film reviews a day or so after I’ve seen a film, allowing me some time to think things over properly.  In the case of When Love Comes, however, I felt I had to write about it as soon as possible.  It’s not because I’ve got anything that urgent that needs to be said, mind you, it’s simply because I can feel all the details from the film escaping my brain and the memory of it may vanish entirely by morning.
When Love Comes is a bit like Relax, It’s Just Sex, in the sense that it’s about three couples; one gay, one straight, one lesbian.  The lesbian couple is the most stable, a musical duo that teams with a songwriter, one half of the gay couple.  The other half is friends with a washed-up dance diva whose ex-boyfriend joins them all for a vacation in the New Zealand countryside.
Rena Owen of Once Were Warriors turns in another excellent performance as the pop star coping with the destruction of her career.  With the exception of an overlong monologue about her ex, every moment on screen with her is a pleasure.
The same can’t be said for the rest of the cast, who, for the most part, barely register.  The lesbian couple doesn’t have any problems and become hard to tell apart, and the younger half of the gay couple goes on a drinking binge so early in the film you don’t even really get a chance to care.  The other two… well, they were there, right?  And one of them was balding?  I remember becoming quickly annoyed with the constant cutaways to the lesbian couple who narrate the thing, a completely unnecessary touch.  And there may have been a nightclub scene in there seomwhere.  I think.
No, no, it’s all getting away from me now.  Maybe I’ve just seen too many movies lately and the more mediocre ones are simply dropping out of my mind.  Or maybe it’s just that When Love Comes is so painfully bland that there’s just no point in remembering it at all.