The Scribbler

First, I have to say I never read the graphic novel, so this opinion is based solely on the movie...

This looked a little weird in the trailer I saw a while back, but it looked like it had the potential to be something different and so I decided to give it a shot. Well it was an interesting story, and I was right, it was weird.

There were some known actors in this film that gave decent performances like Michael Imperioli, Gina Gershon, and Eliza Dushku to name a few. I hadn't seen some of them in a while, so it was definitely a good sign when I saw them in the credits.

I found some of the effects to be OK (the character transformations), but some weren't; like fight scenes with obvious stand-ins. You could clearly see they weren't even close to the same actors which was very distracting in an important part of the film.

Another problem was character development. Most of the secondary characters, minus the two leads, weren't fleshed out very much at all. It made it difficult to care about them or what happens to them. Even the main baddie kind of comes out of nowhere which was very strange to me. Normally these characters are developed a little further so we can kind root for the guy guy (girl!) in the end; but that wasn't the case for me.

I was also a little bit annoyed about the movie taking place in such a small area. This normally isn't something I would notice, but they didn't do a very good job with the sets so it was pretty clear to me it was almost all the exact same set decorated differently. I don't have a problem with a low budget movie using the same set; but at least make me believe it isn't.

This was a little bit of a let down for me. I saw some recognizable faces and thought I might be in for a treat, but in the end the negatives outweigh the positives on this one. I think perhaps if the money was spent more on effects, and the writing (my guess is that they tried to stick to the novel too closely) was a little stronger on the character side, this could have been a decent movie. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case so I'll file this one under watch once to see something weird.

The ONLY reason I watched this is because I like Katie Cassidy, and I'll give anything she's in a chance, such as Supernatural, Harper's Island, Melrose Place, Arrow, Black Christmas, and Kill for Me. However, The Scribbler was a movie that - IMO - was not very good.

It's about a young woman, Suki (Katie Cassidy) who has multiple personalities. One of her personalities is attracted to the only man in the building. Yes, Katie has a rather lengthy topless sex scene. The place she's living is a halfway house for mentally and socially unstable people who are somewhat possible to rehabilitate. The place she resides is called Juniper Towers, but people call it Jumper Towers because some of the inhabitants tend to jump to their deaths. Suki is the prime suspect, and this movie begins with her being interrogated, which leads to the movie being a big flashback, with the sporadic jump to the present. It does have an interesting twist at the end, but having to sit through the rest of this movie to get to that twist is not a fun experience.

I can appreciate that the actors did a good job bringing these crazy characters to life, and they did a good job, but sitting through a movie where most of the characters are crazy is not fun. And the end made absolutely no sense.

Eliza Dushku plays Silk, a police detective, a forgettable character in the movie. Billy Campbell plays the doctor who signed off on Suki's release, but he visits her every now-and-then.

I gave this a 4-star rating. It might prove to be too high. :/

Another picture that had way more potential than its final product. When a young woman with dissociative identity disorder is brought to some kind of madhouse, people start killing themselves for no apparent reason. With a bunch of eccentric characters and a visual style that provokes Sin City comparisons, this comic book adaptation will certainly entertain people and capture their attention till the last minute. Unfortunately it all feels a bit rushed, bloated and shallow. With b-listers like Garret Dillahunt, Gina Gershon, Kunal Nayyar, Billy Campbell and Richard Riehle, this movie has some fun acting and prevents from feeling amateuristic, but in the end it's just too much a "been there, seen that" movie...

I've read the Graphic Novel and watched this movie and both are poorly done despite having great potential. The movie suffers mainly from sparse, unnatural dialog that is also excruciatingly uninteresting plus an almost total lack of a thematic audio track; worse still, much of the dialog is annoyingly echoey. As far as the acting goes, the main character never makes herself believable as a crazy person; Eliza Dushku, as much as I loved her as Faith in Buffy, was totally miscast as a no-nonsense medical professional in this movie; Gina Gershon was entirely underutilized. Overall, I'd like to see this movie picked up by a better production team and made into the great movie it could be. Its main strength was its presentation of the disassociative personality disorder of the main character and her descent into madness and insanity. As it stands right now, I'd recommend the Graphic Novel over the movie mainly because it will take a lot less of your time.

Here is yet another film I went into mostly blind and...it was OK. There were some plot elements that recalled SUCKER PUNCH and MEMENTO, but for the most part it was its own thing and very distinguishable from those. The plot is about Suki, a mental patient with dis-associative identity disorder who is undergoing treatment with a machine that is supposed to "burn" away those extra, unwanted personalities. There have also been a recent rash of deaths of which she is the prime suspect. The best thing I can say about this movie is that it has a very cool visual style and some decent effects and action despite the low budget. Sure, the rain-soaked, color-corrected, graphic novel-esque look has been done to death in the years since SIN CITY came out, but this one felt original enough that it was interesting to watch in that regard. However, I thought that the story brought nothing new to the table, and was equal parts silly and stupid. And, despite a "who's who" of character actors filling out the cast none of the performances were that memorable, let alone great. Katie Cassidy does fine in the lead role as Suki, but she never shows much range. All of the other characters border on caricature and are only there as the plot requires them to be. Also, the plot was very thin and only really does something with it in the last act with a twist that can be seen from a mile away. So, if you like comic books and/or graphic novels and you're looking for something different, by all means check this out. However, if you require a little more from your movie than cool visuals and the barest minimum of a plot then maybe you should skip this one.