Thy Neighbor's Wife

The box looked vaguely enticing. A revenge thriller. Well, it wasn't. It was a sorry collection of scenes cobbled together in a fashion that paid, no more than, lip service to the concept of a story line. The only thing that kept my attention was the realization (which came about 20 minutes in) that every female character in the film was going to get her kit off at some stage. Unfortunately, whilst this does happen, these scenes are interspersed between far too much "drama". Having said that, I still think this video would be far more appropriately placed behind the beaded curtain (at the local video store) than out with the serious movies.

...you know you've just got a direct-to-video stinker. The storyline has been done before (woman attempts to get even with family she feels killed her husband), and has been done better. At least with Shannon Tweed's "Scorned" it didn't take itself too seriously so it made the film enjoyable. This is pretty much dreck from the word "Action!" The male actors in this aren't good at all. Seth Adams Jones who plays David gives perhaps the worst "emotion" scene in film history when he talks to his father about how he should've been stricter. Melissa Stone adds the single worst sex scene in film history as well. While her dolt boyfriend is screwing her on top of their freezer, she just lays there with a straight, hurry-up-and-get-this-scene-over-with-so-I-can-put-my-shirt-back-on face that totally kills whatever eroticism the scene could have.

The other sex scenes aren't much better. Wuhrer can't even be bothered to take her panties off for her scene. Crampton has to use a body double so blatant I wondered why they even bothered with this scene. In the end, Wuhrer's character wins and she drives off into the sunset. There are much better Wuhrer movies, skip over this one.

This movie is truly bad and I can safely say that it is one of the worst films I have watched this year! This film plays more like a bad soap than a thriller. The plot is badly thought out, the dialog is stilted and the acting is wooden at best. Kari Wurher was the only good thing about this movie and even she struggled to give it any life. It includes several gratuitous sex scenes which consist mainly of closeups of silicon enlarged breasts and which have very little to do with the plot. This may of course appeal to a number of people into porn flicks but to most of us it is just down right annoying. Maybe the writers got confused and thought they were still writing a soft-core porn title? Give this one a miss, it is not worth it!

Yes, you heard me right. This film is very highly overrated, and given that it enjoys a 3.7 rating at the time of this writing, that should tell you all that you need to know about it. Maybe it is the gratuitous display of enlarged breasts that caused no less than seven people to give it a ten out of ten. It certainly cannot be the dialogue, which is about as stilted as one can get. Nor could it possibly be the acting, as the cast here make the Days Of Our Lives or Home And Away alumni look good.

Then there's the plot devices. Any film that uses diabetes as a plot device, especially to attempt the murder of a character, automatically gets a thumbs-down from me. Having lived with the condition for seventeen years now, I can tell anyone who hasn't seen an example of it that it takes a lot more than our antagonist does to use someone's diabetes to kill them. It becomes quite clear from the prop syringes used in this film, as well as the fact that the diabetic stereotype (one cannot call these things characters) never checks what her blood glucose level is, that makes it clear the writers here did exactly no research into the condition. Oh, and before I forget, replacing the contents of a 10ml bottle of insulin with saline using a .5ml syringe cannot be done in a matter of minutes, or even an hour. That's one for the goof list.

I had to add this, but I have no trouble believing that nobody in the past twenty years, under the age of fifty, has died from diabetes. Gloria Foster was sixty-eight when she died, and even then, I doubt that her diabetes was the sole factor. It would take a deliberate effort on the victim's part, and one that could not possibly be sustained in light of the incredibly painful symptoms of hyperglycaemia (a word I am sure the writer here has never heard).

One will also note that while this character's synthetic insulin is replaced with saline, and her food spiked (both of which would be impossible to do without escaping notice), she still moves like a gymnast. When one's blood sugar is as high as is implied in one scene, it doesn't just make one feel heated. It makes one feel as if their bones have been hollowed out and filled with ground-up glass. This, and a few blood glucose tests, would invoke a visit to the hospital, which would absolutely defeat the purpose of this scheme.

About an hour into the film, we all drop pretensions and wind up with what is essentially a porn film without the money shot. The horrible background music makes it abundantly clear that the distributor who picked this turgid effort up is also responsible for such stinkers as All The Rage or 2001: A Space Travesty as well as such soft porn crap as Illicit Dreams 2. In short, this is an effort from a porn producer who wants to look vaguely respectable.

In my parlance, a rating of two out of ten is a damning score. This is mainly because it indicates a film that is not bad enough to be good in a reversed sort of way, but rather just plain bad. It is not as offensively awful as some of the stinkers I have rated here, but it is not that far off.

The other reviews are quite on-the-money, so I won't go over the same material, other than to state that this movie has to be one of the clumsiest movies I've ever seen.

Things that ought to have been simple to get right, but obviously weren't:

1) The astonishingly well-endowed housekeeper undresses and gets in the shower. Ann (Kari) sneaks into the house, grabs a VERY large kitchen knife, and proceeds to stab the housekeeper to death with blow after blow with the knife. There is NO blood being spattered. She then wraps the body in a white sheet, and is carrying it through the house. Still no blood. At ALL. With the number of times the housekeeper was stabbed, you'd think she'd be draining like a sieve. But apparently she clots REALLY well.

2) Ann manages to empty a full freezer of its contents, put the body in, and refill the freezer, all in the space of about 30 seconds while the daughter is trying to open the garage door. Although the freezer was full when opened, adding an adult womans body and then piling everything on top doesn't seem to add any mass to the freezer.

3) Ann sneaks into her husbands bosses house, turns on the gas, and sets a light to spark when the switch is turned on. The boss is upstairs, but comes down. Comes down a very large staircase. When he turns on the light, the house is shown (exploding) from the outside. The house is clearly one story.

4) Numerous interior shots of the families house also shows it to be two story. Numerous exterior shots of the house show it to be one story. Apparently it is MUCH larger on the inside than the outside.

5) How many times can a person REALLY get hit full-force with a heavy piece of steel and not be killed? Apparently a LOT of times, because both the husband and Ann repeately give each other good solid blows with both a crowbar and a tire iron. Neither one ends up in the hospital. The husband DOES get a minor cut on his forehead, though.

One wonders if the director or producers even watched this movie prior to releasing it.