User reviews

Predictable, told a thousand times story with the usual drama in between, a couple of pretty raunchy sex scenes intermingled with some character paranoia, 70's style incidental violin horror music that is comical at times, i couldn't help chuckling to myself.

I usually like Defoe, and it has to be said that the acting is not all that bad, the "plot" develops at a reasonable pace and does keep you guessing from time to time. Its just that it's all too predictable, i felt like i was watching a made for TV drama instead of a new movie. Maybe thats the style the directors wanted, but it has to be said that the review i read on here before i saw the movie could only have been written by someone involved in its production.

Don't expect too much, and if i could wind the clock back i wouldn't have gone to see it at the cinema. I would wait for the bargain bins at your video shop, I'm sure it wont take long.

I understand wanting to make a movie that is edgy and different. I understand the previous reviewer comments that this is a miss-understood movie. My point is as soon as this movie ended my first comment was: " this is what happens when a rich princess wants to be a movie star and has no talent".....she uses daddy's' money to make a movie she wrote, directs, and pays for.....obviously to close to the movie to realize there was no character development and no directions such as a beginning, middle and ending.....the voyeur part was good and edgy but what was the point? I saw a women go to a house, find some pictures, screw the caretaker, come out side on a very cold night (not believable) to check on noise and runs over her caretaker lover....movie ends......some one educate my ignorant arss?? I really want to know what the point is....what was the directors' vision.....why no development of the dead lover? Why no background on the caretaker? What is the point of the night vision? What is the point of the lipstick on the car? Why a dead caretaker? Why tell us about an escaped mental patient/peeping tom? What's with the urn? Oh and the lamp is that suppose to signify whose' house this is? Territorial? Why? Why would the caretaker feel like it's his house? that aspect was never pursued......as for William Defoe...I rented this movie because he was in it and known for edgy characters.....write back and do tell me what I need to learn....I am just a mom in middle America who loves movies....Chris....

I am a huge Willem Dafoe fan, and really sought out this film (I had to get a Region 5 Chinese DVD of it!). But, it is truly one of the worst that I've seen in quite a while.

The acting (except for Dafoe) is horrible. Dafoe and Colagrande BOTH wrote and directed this ( though he isn't credited as a director), and they have NO discernible talents for writing or directing. (Stick to acting Willem; Giada get out of the business, PLEASE!)

Absolutely nothing happens. Except a series of completely unconvincing, totally without believable motivation, acts by these two people (that just met) in this house. Colagrande's sleepy, I couldn't care less expression practically NEVER changes. And the sex scenes are downright lame. I actually cringed twice at one of them. Yuck! They're definitely not the least bit erotic, and yet are the only time the film isn't putting you to sleep. Then, it's busy repulsing you.

Just awful.

I own 2 home entertainment stores and I've seen a lot of bad movies in my time but this one was so bad it compelled me to register here and comment on it. How bad was it? Let's just say that Sofia Coppola deserved an Oscar for her performance in Godfather III when compared to Giada Colagrande's in this movie.

It was robotic and uninspired. Her lover has just died one month prior to her arrival at the 'Rubber House' he had given her. Once there, she discovers he has cheated on her throughout her relationship but none of it seems to register with her. Within a day, she starts a relationship with Leslie, (Dafoe) the caretaker of the house. Even though she is married to Dafoe off screen, her scenes with him were cold and unemotional.

If there was a plot, I missed it. Not even Willem Dafoe could save this movie from the amateur, cinematic train wreck that it is.

This title seems more like a filming exercise than a film that should have been released to be seen by the public. For Dafoe and his wife it must have been fun working together in a film for the first time, without taking into consideration that people might actually watch it. I felt like it was 90mins wasted as I waited anxiously for a plot to develop, or even begin.

Try to fit this film into a genre and you won't, because it lacks a beginning, middle or ending. I've seen 'arty' movies before and this doesn't even come close to being arty, abstract or original, it just seems to me to be completely pointless.

I think it speaks for itself when the only persons that rated this film a 10 were the under 18 age group. No doubt for the constant pointless erotic scenes that the film was insistent on throwing at us. That is if you can call it erotic. It certainly didn't have taste.

I too like Dafoe as an actor but i wasted a few hours of my life actually watching this film, I still cant believe i managed to watch it in its entirety. Was there actually a point to the film?, and the ending, well, Im glad i never paid to see this awful pointless piece of pathetic excuse of a film!

Im not sure without hunting the facts out but is Dafoe married or seeing the awful actress in this film in real life, if so was it an attempt to kick start her career?, if so im afraid it must have failed..

I post this in the hope i can actually put someone off watching this film, even if 1 person takes heed of my comments and decides they would much rather watch paint drying i will feel i have made some good in the world, if only i had had the same advice...

I saw this movie in Venice Film Festival and I think it's a GREAT movie! It's funny and touching at the same time, full of tension and sexy, a little scary... and at the end I got really moved by it. It has a very original style and an awkwardness to it that makes it hard to define and to recognize. Most important, it stays with me still now, after two months since I saw it. But I can see why it's a movie that a lot of people don't get and won't like, it feels very intimate and intense, it makes you feel like an inappropriate voyeur... and that's something that most people don't want to deal with and get disturbed by (especially if there is sex involved). Also the fact that people know that Dafoe and Colagrande are a couple in real life (they wrote it together and they both act in it) I think might hurt the movie because people confuse what they see on screen with their real intimacy and get really embarrassed by it, they don't know how to deal with it and sometimes react really bad. I read a terrible review on Variety.com and was shocked of how stupid and mean it was, the reviewer didn't get it at all and seemed angry at the director for making the movie, which is a typical attitude of stupid and frustrated journalists 'wanna-be-directors' that I can't stand. But, as they say, the most interesting movies are always controversial and get the strongest reactions, in the good and the bad! So the fact that people either love it or hate it must be a good sign. Anyway I hope it gets released in the States so that you get a chance to see something really unique and judge yourself!

There are 2 versions of this movie: the sexually explicit one and the censored PG13 one. My review is about the PG13 one which is 91 mins and released in the USA as "The Black Widow" by First Look Entertainment. And when they say it's PG13, they ain't kidding. All the explicit sexual scenes are cut (including the infamous tampon scene you may have heard about), there is zero nudity, and all the swear words are dubbed out.

This is a very minimalist film about isolation, disconnection and unanswered questions. It will confuse & irritate anyone who is looking for a standard plot tied up with a pretty ribbon. Like the Brando film "Last Tango in Paris", it gives us the dysfunctional romance of two people who can't or won't share their past, who have no connection to the present and who haven't got any future. The only glue that holds them together is the house.

The house, known as the "Rubber House" due to it's twisted black appearance, becomes the 3rd character in the story, like a voyeur but more than that--almost like an omniscient presence that observes everything but tells nothing. Again, this may frustrate the viewer who is looking for clearcut answers, but the poetry of the situation is far more important.

There is also a lot of poetry in the dialogue, but you have to work very hard to catch the hints. There's a brilliant scene in a restaurant where the waiter (played by the unforgettable Issach de Bankole) describes a dish called "deconstructed jambalaya"--a recipe that consists of all the elements of jambalaya (a word that literally means "mishmash") but separated into its parts, not allowed to mix. The hilarious deadpan delivery of this speech along with Dafoe's reaction sums up the characters' relationship perfectly. In another cute piece of dialogue, Giada talks about how mathematicians never grow up because, living in an isolated world of abstract concepts, the never learn about the reality of life. This takes us back to the theme of disconnection and the timelessness of isolation which we feel in the Rubber House. The whole movie is very cryptically written, but if you pay attention to theme, not plot, it will make perfect sense.

The key to enjoying this film is to imagine it's the first film ever made. Don't compare it to anything. Don't expect anything. There are no shootouts, car chases, criminal masterminds, Hollywood romances or melodramatic tear-jerkers. If you can somehow scrub those preconceptions out of your mind, I think you'll find that this movie is much closer to a real story than anything you've seen in the last 20 years. Whether that's entertaining or not is entirely up to you.

I am not an artistically inclined individual. I am a science minded woman and I felt that this movie was maybe one of those campy artsy type films on a budget. I watched part of it with my fiancé and my future step daughter. We tried very hard to find something in this film to keep our interest. My fiancé and his daughter voted it off and we moved on to Ocean's 13,but that is another story. Not to be deterred I awoke the next morning and gave the movie another shot. I began again watching this movie in earnest. I just don't get it,I thought I would get it.I thought the funniest part was the flushing of the ashes and the urn finding a spot by the fireplace being used as a vase for what appeared to be dead flowers. Interesting and still it had dead stuff inside. It was an odd and bizarre movie. Maybe this is what they were after,however I won't be tricked a second time!

I watched the DVD (called BLACK WIDOW in the U.S.A.) and felt afterward that it was, indeed, a truly awful movie. But they must have cut quite a bit out of the original film, or I missed a lot. The sex scenes had very little vulgarity and no nudity (not even a breast), but I've read several other comments on IMDb.com mentioning the vulgarity and something about a tampon. I did not see anything like that, just a bad, boring film with unlikable characters and a trite, sophomoric plot. Giada Colagrande is either paralyzed from the mouth up or Botoxed to the gills, and nary an expression touches her face. And her name makes me think of super-sizing a beverage at Taco Bell: "I'll have the Cola Grande!" It was actually kind of fun it was so bad, I got to play like I was in my own Mystery Science Theater 3000, noting things like the fact that Dafoe's skin is too big for his face. It's really like silly putty!

The photography on the DVD is so dark I thought the screen had died. I think I missed seeing half of the movie. Still, it was poorly crafted and not interesting. I did not find the story related to the title "The Black Widow". I was hoping for a mystery or a thriller but did not get involved enough to care after the first few frames. I rented the movie especially for Willem Dafoe and was sad it wasted his talent. I do not believe Giada Colagrande has studied movie making long enough to develop a major motion picture. She is attractive and might develop into an actor but she took on too many tasks in this movie. Although they are married in real life, they lack chemistry on the screen. Their relationships did not seem believable. I do not understand why the other characters were even introduced into the plot.

The only reason I watched the movie till the end was the "hope" to see something interesting. The movie is really bad and the performance of the girl it is really, really bad, honestly, I am not a movie critic neither an expert but you just need common sense to notice that this work it is incredibly bad.

The first thing that came to my mind as soon as she started to talk was: "She has an affair with Willem Dafoe and he accepted to help her with the screenplay and appear in her movie since she is the brilliant director"... surprise, surprise, next day after I watched the film I found out on internet that Giada Colagrande is his wife. Awful story and terrible performance.

Such very low ratings on IMDB! Willem DaFoe is Leslie, caretaker on a farm in new york. and the italian woman Eleonora (Giada Colagrande) arrives on the scene to see what exactly she has inherited. Colagrande's acting is terrible..this was only her second role, and it's very over-done. and there's a loud clock ticking for the first half of the film.. it's out of place, and we don't know why it's ticking, so we don't really care. we see some dirty photos, but nothing is explained, and it's shown so briefly, that we aren't sure what's going on. bad directing. now we know why it's rated so low on IMDB. big giant yawn. is there a marx brothers movie on somewhere? skip this one! Written and directed by Giada Colagrande, this one is also known as Black Widow. Filmed in various locations in New York.

I normally think of Dafoe as a name to pay attention to. He's been a legend in the industry. But I agree with 99% of the reviews here: this film was absolutely horrible. I mean, I am trying to see it as a story of value -- a refined Italian introvert whose lover dies and leaves her a house he fondly calls the Rubber House (rubbers in the drawers and "rubber" plants in the living room). There she learns he was a playboy and that his step and fetch it actually lived there with his girlfriend before the quasi-widow arrived to claim her property and try to learn about the man who left her alone. Reeling from learning the truth, she naively seeks comfort in the 'caretaker' who tries to please her due to feelings of obligation... The film fails to portray any of the psychological innuendos due to Giada's lack of experience acting. Reading that she is Dafoe's wife brings some sense to the film and the couple's desire to work together and produce soft peorn for their fans if not merely for themselves. Prior to Before It Had a Name (AKA Black Widow) she had never done anything in the film industry except produce documentaries and pursue hobbies. I'm just not sure many of us can relate or that we can find it interesting even if we do. It's certainly not Splendor in the Grass, Girl Interrupted or Dead Man type of crazy isolated drama... If we think of how Elizabeth Taylor would have done this part (Suddenly Last Summer) now that could have been interesting. But this film? No. I really feel terrible leaving a one star for Dafoe but hey, I'd be lying if I didn't.

Italian-born Eleonora has inherited from her deceased lover Karl, an ultra-modern and isolated house in the middle of the woods. It's winter and she meets the mysterious caretaker Leslie, who eventually ends up not only just looking after the house, but also that of Eleonora, as she tries to adapt to her new surroundings and a growing attraction between the pair.

What was I expecting? A thriller indeed, but it wasn't quite so. That's just the advertising on the package for ya! I'm quite perplex about everything. The title, the story and the motivation. So how to classify it? Well, this wooden character drama is more a enigmatically moody romance bound-story of alienation, possession and dependence twisted into a complicatedly passionate relationship of two masked individuals. Co-writer (along with William Dafoe) and director Giada Colagrande's art-house film is just too clinical, distant and calculated with its mysteriously metaphoric story, which it leaves you questioning what does it all really mean… although when its sudden conclusion materialises, you'll thinking why should I actually care. What we go through feels aimless with ponderous exposition of dead air that focuses of insignificant details and images. Sterile dialogues can contributed to many awkward developments, but more so make for an leaden experience, as it never delves deep enough. Like it believes it does. The sexually salty activities filtered in just never convince and are far from erotic. They are kind of a bump in the already sluggish flow. The base of the plot makes for something interesting and fresh, but it's never fulfilling and I thought there'll be more to it then all of this dreary lingering. Colagrande's direction is professionally stylish and suitably gloomy to want she imagines, but everything feels like it's in slow motion and can get caught up admiring the same views. Most of the action stays at the one location… the house. Camera-work is potently taut, but the sullen musical score can get a bit ridiculous when it goes for some dramatically stabbing music cues that served little sense and purpose to the scenes. Giada Colagrande plays it sensually and William Dafoe sleep walks the part. He looks dog tired! While Seymour Cassel, pokes his head in now and then.

Just where is it heading, is anyone's guess. Well, that's if you can wait around for it. I think I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, as it's definitely not what I was expecting from this Indie film.

I really had fun with the 10/10 reviews. :D We watched that undead picture at telly one night. It may be a dark romantic comedy in a parallel universe where 'dark romantic comedy' stands for pointless imbecile crap. It is only perfect for laughing aloud with friends about shitty violin parts and their funny use, lame and ludicrous dialogues and disgusting stone cold anti-erotic sex scenes. It lacks everything a movie makes up, this thingy is neither artsy nor European, it's an insult to every talented Independent writer/director. -_- Oh, and did I mention that the acting is pathetic? The director is the wife of WD. I can tell which way the wind is blowing...

I saw this movie because I like Dafoe's acting and because I knew he was married to Giada Colagrande in real life. Therefore, I was curious about watching both of them working together. I thought it was a thriller or at least had some suspense but nothing of the sort, because to be honest, nothing interesting happens. The film is just awful. To make matters worse one of the erotic scenes makes you feel...um, well...Yuck! I have never seen a blooded Tampax the way it is portrayed in the movie. By the way, Giada, acting is not for you.

Although it is not Willem's best role he is Ok. But Giada, please, leave the acting for your husband.

This was one of the worst movies I have ever seen. I can't believe Dafoe signed onto this movie. It was not a part to be played by him. I like Dafoe. It had a terrible plot, you had no idea what the hell was going on from one minute to the next. Two people that didn't like each other from the start, but over and over, kept staying and having sexual contact all thru the movie with some pretty graphic scenes. Especially the FIRST one. Toward the end, I still dont know what the hell was going on. And then the end! WTH? I dont even know why I watched it other than I had it on while reading. This was a wasted 99 minutes of my life. DO NOT WATCH this horrible movie! Dafoe HAD to be hard up for money to take on this movie part. I can see NO other reason.