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Cruel and UnusualRating:
Release Date: 30 April, 2002 Retail Price: $9.95 OUR Price: $9.95 You SAVE: $0.00! Cast: Complete Cast (6 total) |
Cruel and Unusual Reviews
Stephen King Lite
The only thing cruel about this movie is despite it's flaws I watched the entire thing hoping it would get better, and the most unusual is how much it resembles a bad parody of a Stephen King story.
Starting off with Tom Berenger's character leaving a bloody trail of bodies, his serial killer character murders a man on the side of the road and assuming the man's identity, goes to a small Maine town to work in a lighthouse. Almost immediately he picks two people to be his next victims - a brother and sister, Mike and Kate O'Connor. What happens next is supposed to be scary, I suppose, but if you're going to insist on watching this, I suggest you have something else to do at the same time- like sewing or a craft project, so you won't be completely bored.
There's more plot holes in this film then I could begin to count. For instance, the killer has sex with his victims before he kills them and even left tons of hair at another scene. Yet, when a mangled body turns up everyone shrugs and says " That must be our killer". Come on, haven't the writers ever heard of DNA? Also, the killer steals a man's identity and just comes into a small town and is accepted? Obviously, the writers have never lived in a small town before. People in small towns are highly suspicious of outsiders, and I can not believe they would trust the word of a stranger over the word of one of their own.
The only reason this movie gets two stars instead of one is Tom Berenger himself. He's a good actor and he plays a great psychopath. If he weren't in it, this would be a one star dud for sure.
So if you want a Tom Berenger movie, get Platoon, or Sniper and if you want a good story about a psycho killer in a small Maine town, get Dark Half.
The mutual encounter of an unhappy childhood!
Maybe the most important and even discretely suggested message in the film be the harsh childhood of the three principal personages along the film. Every one of them suffered the rigors of a merciless and cruel father before the quiet presence of the mother. One of them opted by being a serial killer to vindicate his fears and somehow to redeem anybody who pretended to be happy: you will see the angels very soon. This bloody attitude reveals a classic answer, a scream in the darkness inside his phantom world. The pleasure and the sublime act of love seems to be in him just a special sparkling ignition to put in action the ancestral codes of repressed anger and restrained fury. The rest of the world will have to pay his internal frustrations: so simple like that.
In the other hand we have to Mike a good for nothing guy, an extremely frightened man who seems to be a sleepwalker in the life without will, personality and responsibility. His sister developed a stronger character and somehow she has to carry that awful weight with him.
In this state of things this serial killer superbly played by Tom Berenger - a very neglected actor by Hollywood- makes an interesting role of this disturbed mind murderer, who will appear in the isolated Oregon Valley appearing to change seriously the bitter situation of both brothers.
The idea was terrific and my only claim was precisely not emphasize in this sense. However the film gets its purpose and lets us with an open end of mystery and complicity.
Ravishing direction.
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