Haven't We Met Before?

A man attacks a woman he believes led to him being hanged in a past life. While in prison, an investigation into his claims leads to some truth behind his claims. The first 20 minutes of the movie were terrible (awful shots and acting) but after that it got pretty interesting.

A psychiatrist gets an ideal patient to experiment with, so by hypnosis and other psychological and psychiatric tricks he gets in command of the patient's mind and starts monitoring him to commit all kinds of senseless murders on innocent people the witch-doctor thinks has destroyed a number of his previous lives. In brief, the psychiatrist gets so muddled up in his past lives speculations that he confuses them with reality and think they real enough to write a book about them, and that is only the beginning. The story gets all kinds of deviations into other speculations and theorizations all leading nowhere, the sum of it all being that nothing makes any sense. There is no harm in speculating in past lives or even in investigating the matter, but getting bogged down in them deep enough to make them take over your life is getting the whole thing a bit thick. There are too many murders here, they are all completely senseless and without meaning, and although the photo and the acting is good, the story just isn't. Making a film on this mental confusion was a complete waste of time and resources. Fortunately none of the actors was a prominent star.

I believe I read every novel Mary Higgins Clark wrote during the 90's. Once I started, I couldn't put them down. They were absolutely mesmerizing, you had to keep reading because you felt you were one of the characters, or at least a witness. Few novelists can imprint that in readers. And we really enjoy that kind of cinematic adventures, you can picture every single event, the mood, the colors, the temperature, the general atmosphere in each situation. Well, this is not depicted in this movie. The characters seem to play from boredom and it is difficult to fathom what they are thinking, much less feeling. Only Nicolette Sheridan is believable, but of course she alone can do very little to improve the script. Go get the book, don't waste your time watching this.

I watched this movie last night on PAX for two reasons: I like Nicolette Sheridan, and I wanted to see a Mary Higgins Clark book-based movie.

However, I was disappointed w/the movie. There were lots of flashbacks to the previous lives of the Stephen Koenig character, played by Page Fletcher, and the Emily Winton character, played by Nicolette Sheridan. However, these flashbacks just made it confusing and hard to follow the flow of the movie.

I liked the chemistry between Emily and Detective Jack Cobel, played by Anthony Lemke. I had never seen Mr. Lemke in a movie before, and he was very appealing. However, they never developed their relationship, cutting off their scenes before anything happened between them.

I kept waiting for something exciting to happen, but this movie just didn't work for me.

Apparently Sonny Grosso bought the rights to all of these Mary Higgins Clark novels. Was her agent afraid they wouldn't get another offer?

Sonny produced some wonderful series from Canada in the '80s, but the boring filming of these stories leaves a lot to be desired. All the money seems to go for the female star, and that's it. He certainly doesn't splurge for top writers or directors.

As a result, even though the stories themselves are intriguing, the end result of these films is always the same: slow and so what.

"Haven't We Met Before?" is one of the better Higgins Clark stories and could have been developed in a richer way. In this one, a man (Page Fletcher) believes the people he killed wronged him in a past life.

He is caught while trying to murder Kate (Nicolette Sheridan), whom he believes was Emily in a past life, who killed her husband and let him be hanged for it.

This story should have been riveting. It wasn't. It did, however, keep me interested due to the plot. And as usual, I sort of figured it out.

Why? Because there's something about the way these stories are set up where there's a subtle giveaway. I can't figure out what it is, I don't know if it's the way the scenes are directed or what, but I always know.

Again, because of Mary Higgins Clark and not anything else, I like watching these filmed novels. Maybe it's a sense of comfort that I know what I'm going to get:

Bad pacing, okay acting from Canadian actors I've never seen before, a pretty and familiar star, a good story, and Sonny Grosso's trademark suspense music.