The more I see of his work, the more I am convinced that genre film fans have been tricked into seeing any value in the filmography of director Niko Mastorakis. Sure, Island Of Death is a twisted hoot, but nothing else he has done even comes close to it. It seems that he cannot make a straightforward thriller or horror movie that manages to be above average. When I saw this film from him marketed as a techno-thriller riff on Rear Window I knew that I definitely wasn’t going to see anything even remotely close to that masterpiece.
The first clue was Mastorakis being in the director’s chair, of course.
The second clue was the cast. Nastassja Kinski and Nicolette Sheridan? Fine. Jeffery Dean? Never heard of him, but okay. Melinda Clarke? Yes! Kim Valentine? Sure. Roger Daltrey? Uh oh. Huey Lewis?? Oh, come ON.
The third element to get my “Spidey-sense” tingling was the fact that this wasn’t just a techno-thriller . . . it was a techno-thriller from 2002. Those things usually age about as well as a specific prediction from a spiritualist.
Kinski plays Sondra, a woman who has been temporarily disabled by a skiing accident. Her patronizing boyfriend, Ben (Daltrey), shows her how to work the super-computer that can control his home and then heads off for work-related stuff that will keep him absent for the rest of the movie. Sondra suspects that Ben has been chatting with women online so she immediately accesses the one and only dating forum on the internet, guesses Ben’s password with unbelievable ease, and is soon chatting to a mystery woman (Valentine). This brings both of them to the attention of a killer (Dean), who then tells Sondra about his plans for murder, and sets up a live feed directly to her screen. Unable to help, Sondra and her friend, Misty (Sheridan), eventually get connected to Agent Matheson (Lewis), who sets out with his partner, Agent Williams (Clarke), to stop the killer.
That plot summary is more in-depth than I intended, and it’s arguably more time and effort than this film deserves. There’s a decent, if familiar, core idea in place, but the script, co-written by Mastorakis and Phil Marr, alternates between characters delivering dialogue that thumps on the ground like lead balloons and horrible attempts to visualize people interacting with computers in scenes completely lacking the tension or thrills that Mastorakis seems to think he’s injecting.
It’s a shame that the cast are such a mixed bag, and most don’t feel like the best choice. I like Kinski, but she’s unable to do anything with what she’s given here. Sheridan is equally hampered, being directed in most of her scenes to look at the same monitor as Kinski and look worried. Valentine does well, but isn’t in the movie enough, an issue which you can multiply for Clarke, although Clarke may feel relieved that she didn’t get even more scenes to deliver “internet guide for dummies” exposition. Daltrey and Lewis are both distracting, neither do good enough to make you stop wondering why they were cast. Then you have Dean, stuck playing a character who feels like a parody of psycho killers. He doesn’t ever feel menacing, but he does get to speak and type a lot of pretentious and poetic twaddle to make people think he is working on some higher plane to us mere non-killers.
I am not sure if this is bad enough to call incompetent, it’s generally just dull throughout (the 96-minute runtime seeming to stretch out to at least two hours), but it’s definitely bad enough to prove that Mastorakis fails as a movie director much more often than he succeeds. Ctrl-alt-delete.
3/10
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