Sweet Angel Mine

Paul is a Londoner in Canada, looking for his Dad (I saw it from about 1/2 hour in). He meets Roisin ("Rasheen" as she's called in the credits), a girl with an extremely unfriendly, possessive mother. Lurking in the background is Roisin's even more evil grandmother.

What develops is a solid mystery as to this house of women, Paul becoming increasingly hostile and frightened of the mother Megan, and him wanting to help Roisin get away and see what life has to offer.

It's all explained quite neatly by the end, helped along by decent acting, a fairly good script, and some really quite horrifying moments. Definite shades of Psycho in this.

To my knowledge, this is the first film I've seen that is entirely filmed in Nova Scotia, Canada, or at least the first one that puts forward the region so prominently. I must say I'm deeply impressed by the beauty of this area, and that alone made "Sweet Angel Mine" worth viewing. One the other hand, one could state that, if the filming locations are the best part of a thriller, there's something seriously wrong with the film itself.

"Sweet Angel Mine" is a bizarre and semi-ambitious mix between coming-of-age, occult thriller and feminist drama. A young Londoner on a motorcycle cruises across the woods and small towns of Nova Scotia, hoping to unravel the mystery of what happened to his father, who disappeared here many years ago. The answers he seeks might be found in an isolated farmhouse run by a family of women (spooky grandma, enigmatic mother, pure daughter), but the boy is more interested in diving into the haystack with the daughter; - and maybe also the mother. The script isn't great, but nevertheless compelling enough to keep you interested. Also, whenever the story tends to get boring or overly pointless, director Curtis Radclyffe effectively inserts a bit of sex or macho bar fights. The ending is foreseeable, at least if you are into this sort of cinema, but it's pleasingly grim and mean-spirited. Decent performances, too, most notably from the gorgeous Alberta Watson ("The Keep", "The Soldier")

Bizarre, to be sure. Has a look and feel like a low budget 70's exploitation flick.

The acting is actually pretty good, and so is the the cinematography.

The "surprise" is pretty easy to predict.

It's nice to see the great British actress Anna Massey. She deserves to be in better films. Remember her in Hitchcock's "Frenzy?"

Content-wise, this is really a dark and perverse film. No kids allowed.

How do I love this movie? Let me count the ways. OK. I'm done counting. I can count the ways I love this movie on fewer than the fingers of one hand. In fact, I wouldn't even need one finger. Not unless I was using my middle finger.

This is the type of movie where you root for the young lover-wannabes to NOT get together at the end. This is the type of movie where you root for the entire cast of characters to die in the end. And speaking of root, this is the type of movie that gives undergoing a root canal a good name. That's what I wish I'd been doing instead of watching this movie---undergoing a root canal.

One really has to wonder how this film got by the Canadian Board of Tourism. Not to mention the Province of Nova Scotia's Chamber of Commerce. That's where it takes place. ("Come visit beautiful Nova Scotia. You, too, can act like an idiot!") The plot? Why bother? When every character in a movie can't get a clue, ESPECIALLY the two young lovers, then any alleged plot becomes meaningless. The best ending for this movie would have been for all of its characters, in one mass group-in, to have thrown themselves into the Atlantic Ocean from atop the rocky Nova Scotian cliffs. And to have taken the director (Curtis Radclyffe) with them! That, finally, would have been the first thing about this movie to make any sense.

"Sweet Angel Mine." Never judge a movie by its title. I did. And because I did, I wasted nearly two hours of my lifetime. That's two lost hours that can never be reclaimed. A root canal, at least, when it's all over, turns out to have been worthwhile time well spent.

A young British man named Paul (Oliver Milburn) is in Canada searching for his father. He stumbles upon a farm in a remote part of Nova Scotia, where a beautiful woman and daughter are the only people for miles. Paul gets hired on to do some work around the place.

At first, it's an ideal situation, until Paul begins to suspect that there's something wrong with mum and her "angel". Circumstances arise that threaten Paul's sanity and his life.

SWEET ANGEL MINE is a subtle thriller / chiller, right up until the all-hell-breaks-loose finale. It contains some rather gruesome images and sequences. There's romance mixed with disturbing psychosexual occurrences. It gets high marks for originality and a bizarre story line...