Worth Mentioning - We're Burning Moonlight

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Cody endured a whole lot of thrills.

UNHINGED (2020)

Rachel (Caren Pistorius) has hit a rough patch in her life. She's in the middle of a divorce from her teenage son Kyle (Gabriel Bateman), she has lost her hair salon, she's in danger of losing her house, she just had to move her mom into an assisted living facility, her slacker brother and his girlfriend have moved in with her, and as the film gets started she loses her best remaining client due to her tendency to run late. But her day is only going to get worse from that point.

Russell Crowe plays a character known only as Man, and we're introduced to him as he busts his way through a front door of a home with a hammer, which he then uses to beat a man and a woman to death inside the home before he lights the place on fire. Man only gets more despicable from there.

Rachel and Man cross paths as she's trying to rush Kyle to school. Man's pickup truck is sitting at a red light in front of her, and when the light turns green and Man doesn't move, Rachel lays on her horn in frustration while swerving around him. Of course, we know right away that this was a terrible mistake, we've already seen what Man is capable of, and Rachel quickly learns just how bad of a mistake that was. As of about the 20 minute mark of this 86 minute film, Man's homicidal rage is directed toward Rachel, and he dedicates his day to making sure she finds out what a "bad day" really is. As if she didn't know already... although it's true that she never knew a bad day like this before. Man beats, murders, and maims multiple people to achieve his goal, leaving Rachel desperate to escape his wrath and protect her loved ones from him.

Directed by Derrick Borte from a screenplay by Carl Ellsworth, Unhinged is a very intense thriller that makes for a quick, engrossing, unnerving viewing experience. Pistorius handles the heroine role very well; this was my first time ever seeing this actress in anything, and I was impressed. Rachel is a flawed character, but she's easy to side with, especially since Man is so frightening. Crowe is completely believable as this rage-fueled beast, and I actually found his performance to be quite disturbing. Rachel and the people around her don't deserve anything Man does to them, and yet he thinks he is totally justified in what he's doing. Stories of violent, senseless road rage have always been troubling to me, and Man takes that sort of nonsense to a whole other level.

I highly recommend this movie to thriller fans.

POOLBOY NIGHTMARE (2020)

Thirty years after he made his feature debut with the horror comedy There's Nothing Out There, Rolfe Kanefsky's filmmaking career is still going strong - and he has even gotten in on the Lifetime thriller action by writing and directing Poolboy Nightmare.

Poolboy Nightmare begins with a woman played by Blind star Sarah French being attacked by an unseen assailant while she's taking a swim in her backyard pool. Her attacker knocks her out, then takes her into the house and drowns her in her bathtub. To the authorities, it doesn't look like murder, it looks like she accidentally slipped in her tub and hit her head. Months pass, and the woman's house is purchased by newly single Gale (Jessica Morris of Bloody Murder, The Wrong Roommate, and Art of the Dead), who has an 18-year-old daughter named Becca (Ellie Darcey-Alden).

It isn't long before Gale looks outside and sees 25-year-old Adam (Tanner Zagarino) cleaning the backyard pool. Viewers will immediately know that Adam was responsible for the murder of the home's former occupant, especially since the movie is called Poolboy Nightmare, but Gale doesn't have the information we do, and one glimpse of Adam's plumber's crack while he's working gets her lusting after him. Adam just happens to like older women, so you know where this is going.

Unfortunately for Adam, Gale tells him their hook-up was just a one time. He doesn't take this well, and his mission to make sure he becomes a permanent fixture in Gale's life starts with him making a move on a very receptive Becca. Gale, understandably, doesn't want Adam around her daughter, and Becca's best friend Jackie (Cynthia Aileen Strahan, who was in Kanefksy's Art of the Dead with Morris and French) is creeped out by the guy, but getting rid of Adam isn't an easy thing to do... and he's quite willing to hurt or even murder anyone who stands in the way of the happily ever after he intends to have with Gale.

If you've watched any Lifetime thrillers, you probably know what to expect from Poolboy Nightmares, and Kanefsky delivered exactly the movie viewers tuned in to see. This is a fun movie to watch, and Zagarino gives a great performance as his very off-balance character. He's convincing and captivating as Adam turns Gale and Becca's lives upside down with his insanity.

SCARE ME (2020)

When aspiring author Fred (Josh Ruben, who also wrote and directed the movie) rents a cabin in the snowy countryside hoping to be able to get some writing done, despite not having much of an idea for his novel, he finds that a neighboring cabin is occupied by another writer, bestselling author Fanny (Aya Cash). Soon after Fred and Fanny first cross paths, Fred's latest unsuccessful writing session is interrupted by a power outage - and then Fanny shows up at his door.

Fred and Fanny quickly decide to pass the time by telling each other creepy stories, and this sort of set-up would have usually been presented as the wraparound story for an anthology film. The two authors would tell each other stories, and we'd actually see the stories they tell get brought to life by other cast members - and, if we saw the things Fred and Fanny were talking about, special effects artists would have had quite a job to do as well. But Scare Me is not an anthology movie, instead it comes off as an acting exercise for Ruben and Cash. There are no cutaways to show the stories they tell, the film stays with them the entire time. We watch Fred and Fanny tell each other several stories.

A lot of viewers will probably be wanting to see the stories brought to life, they might find just watching Ruben and Cash tell the stories to be dull. However, both actors turn in impressive, entertaining performances, so I was perfectly fine with watching them deliver all of this dialogue. To help keep things fresh, they also get a brief visit from a pizza delivery guy named Carlo (Chris Redd), who is enthusiastically on board with this "tell each other stories" idea.

She has a small role, but I have to mention that Rebecca Drysdale also contributes a great, funny performance to the film as Bettina, the woman who drives Fred to the cabin and has some story ideas of her own.

Werewolves, zombies, trolls, revenge - Fred and Fanny tell each other some good stories, and then their interactions fall apart.

While I had fun watching Scare Me, I find its 104 minute running time to be a bit much. After all, we are just watching a couple people talk to each other in a cabin for the majority of those 104 minutes. It could have been trimmed down a bit, but it still didn't feel like it was dragging too often.

THE PERFECT BRIDE (1991)

The Perfect Bride is the sort of thriller that gets shown on Lifetime on a regular basis, but since it was made in the early '90s, when things had higher budgets and were shot on film, it does have better production value than the average modern Lifetime movie. Plus the bride of the title is actually so imperfect, she's a homicidal maniac who claims multiple victims over the course of the film, that the claim could reasonably be made that this goes beyond thriller territory and becomes a horror movie along the lines of The Stepfather.

Directed by Terrence O'Hara from a script by Claire and Monte Montgomery, the film stars Sammi Davis (no connection to the Rat Packer) as Stephanie, a seemingly pleasant young nurse who has gotten engaged to a fellow named Ted (Linden Ashby). Ted's sister Laura (Kelly Preston) has never liked Ted's girlfriends, and her feelings toward Stephanie certainly aren't positive - but in this case, she has a very good reason for feeling uneasy about her brother's fiancée. In the days leading up to the wedding, Laura discovers that Stephanie has a very dark past. She has been engaged more than once before, and each time her fiancés have dropped dead. That's because whenever Stephanie finds out something she doesn't like about her significant other, she decides to murder them rather than break up with them. Her favorite method of murder is to inject people with potassium so their deaths look like heart attacks.

Stephanie doesn't just kill her husbands-to-be, either. If she feels that someone is a danger to her relationship, she'll knock them off, too. Like the caterer who recognizes her from one of her previous almost-weddings, or the Reverend who doesn't think she and Ted are going to last, and wants to talk to Ted about the issue.

It looks like The Perfect Bride might have first aired on Fox and/or USA Network back in '91, so the content is rather TV friendly, but the story is interesting, Davis is good at playing a maniac, and Preston makes Laura a heroine we can root for. The movie is worth checking out if you can track it down.

The one questionable aspect of the film is the character of Gramps, Ted and Laura's grandfather. Played by veteran character actor John Agar, Gramps is obviously dealing with some sort of brain disease that is severely affecting his cognitive functions, but his condition is played entirely for laughs. Whether Gramps is mixing up who someone is or answering the phone in a restaurant, we're supposed to be laughing at how confused this old man is. I don't think a character like Gramps would be portrayed that way now.