Listen

"Listen" is pretty good, especially since I like actress Sarah Buxton.

The movie is exciting, and rather complicated; it's all cleared up in the end, though.

Why should I feel a little guilty for liking 'Listen' so much? Because it has telephone voyeurism, lots of sex and an obsessive lesbian? Those things work to its advantage. This movie has all the stuff that a fan of the late-night cable channel thrillers goes for, including a complicated plot and a finger pointed at everybody.

Brooke Langton and Sarah G. Buxton are likable (and watchable) in this movie, at least in my book. Veteran Andy Romano adds some seasoning as one of the police detectives (there's always police detectives in these flicks, right?) and some of the younger actors like Gordon Currie, Joel Wyner and Evan Taylor do good jobs also.

This film makes for a very confusing ninety minutes - so confusing, in fact, that the perpetrator has to explain the denouement by means of a voiceover right at the very end.

The plot itself is very simple. Someone is apparently titillating women via a telephone chatline, meeting them face to face and then brutally murdering them. Overhearing these conversations by way of a faulty telephone handset, a young woman (Brooke Langton) comes to the conclusion that the murderer is someone living in her own apartment block. So to help the story simmer away nicely we are given a few ingredients to play with - a reclusive boyfriend, a lesbian lover, an aggressive co-resident and a weird caretaker, along with a couple of dark and languid sex scenes. It's true that the plot has a few twists but amidst the bemusement, they neither help nor hinder.

One of the problems of this film is that the two lead characters are so physically alike that it's difficult to tell which is which - only the shape of their mouths offers a clue. Both are nevertheless competent and credible actresses. However, it's the feeble storyline and not the acting that lets this film down. Ultimately, it's an erotic thriller without the eroticism and the thrills.

Quite the most boring nonsense I have seen in a long time. The plot was full of irrelevance, and the acting was the worst I have seen in a long time.

To make it worse, camera angles that made me feel sick were used , the incidental music was terrible and drowned out the dialogue (maybe not a bad thing then), and the shots of San Francisco looked as if they had been stolen straight out of the city tourist board's promotional video.

Oh, and the obligatory sex scene was not even half well done. Better lighting next time, please.

This movie has a lot of problems. Set in San Francisco, but obviously filmed elsewhere (Vancouver, I think) it overuses way too many of the erotic thriller clichés. It wasn't very erotic, with only one scene being an exception. It casts suspicion on too many characters. There is some really poor acting by the police characters, and the supposed big-city police department was shockingly inept. But I suppose if they had done a better job, there would a lot less to make a movie about. Brooke Langton and Sarah Buxton, the two leads, are really the only ones in the film who could act at all. They carried the corpse of this movie through all of the gaping plot holes, and in the end, one of the characters had to explain the whole thing in a voice-over. Ugh. Don't bother, although it's unlikely anyone will see it these days. I had taped it from cable many years ago, and just watched it. Probably not available commercially any more.