IAGO-16

Movie catastrophes tend to go to extremes in search of deadly threats, or plots that justify a large FX budget. This very good German thriller, instead, increases its dramatic value precisely because it takes a very run-of-the-mill danger, not really appreciated by the public, who ignore that even the cleanest cities in the world have a rate of from six to ten rats per human inhabitant (and really dirty ones, can boast up to a hundred rats per human). The action is placed in Frankfort, where a strike of garbage men and an unusually hot spell result in a massive infestation of the city, overrun by famished, vicious and aggressive rodents. Very much worth seeing, with a good couple of leads played by Ralph Herforth and Ann Cathrin Buhtz. It had to be made in the country of the original Pied Piper of Hamelin...

Elizabeth Montgomery is, as usual, perfect in her role as the real life journalist and Pulitzer Prize Winner Edna Buchanan in this film loosely based on her book, which highlights her 18 year career as a crime reporter in Miami, where she covered about 5000 violent deaths, more than 3000 of them, homicides. The film and the book, however, don't follow the trodden path of so many real-life crime stories, thanks to the detachment and humor which Buchanan imbues her work with, which gives a droll slant to her otherwise macabre stories. Furthermore, the script deals with only one case, which captures the spirit of both the author and the book, as Edna and some friends in the Miami Police Department (Dennis Farina, Yaphet Kotto) search for the missing teenage daughter of a distraught father, played by Lee Horsley. (The film has been retitled abroad as Daddy's girl).

If now Oscar-winner Tommy Lee Jones were allowed to delete all memory of one of his previous films, no doubt he would choose this incredible mess of a thriller to cast into oblivion. He plays a private dick who is hired by a rich husband to settle some matters with his ex-wife, who is holding some jewelry of his in her possession. Only that the woman apparently has been dead for a decade! He takes the case thinking of making easy money with a crackpot client, but the woman appears to be alive and well and even very seductive (Virginia Madsen, no less), all qualities painfully lacking in the film, which is slow, poorly acted (evidence of a great lack of enthusiasm on the side of Tommy and par for the course for Madsen)and disconcertingly ambiguous, undecided between a solid thriller of unexpected final twists (which it has not) and a run of the mill ghost-story that had traded horror for sensuality. Really dreadful.