Ring Around The Rosie

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Rating 2½


Directed by Rubi Zack

Written by Jeff McArthur, Alex Barder, Jim Suthers, Michael Tabb and Rubi Zack

Starring Gina Philips, Tom Sizemore, Jenny Mollen, Randall Batinkoff and Frances Bay


Following the death of her grandmother, Karen (Gina Philips), a successful publicist, goes to the remote family home where she spent the first thirteen years of her life to pack up the contents in preparation for selling the estate. Her boyfriend Jeff (Randall Batinkoff) accompanies her for the first weekend, but after that he has to return to the city.

Karen discovers to her surprise that there are still horses on the estate, cared for by Pierce (Tom Sizemore), the helpful and friendly but also rather creepy caretaker who lives down at the bottom of the hill. She also begins to have strange unnerving dreams and is relieved when her younger sister Wendy (Jenny Mollen) arrives to help her to clear the house. However, Karen’s nightmares grew steadily more frightening and Pierce becomes increasingly violent, leading the sisters into a desperate fight for their lives.

This is direct-to-DVD fare and quite one of the silliest films I have seen in a while. To put things into perspective, it is certainly no worse than ‘The Reaping’, a film with a much bigger budget and a major marketing campaign behind it, but it is still intriguing to know how a film could go so badly wrong. The actress Sarah Michelle Gellar once remarked, “I never really understood how great actors made bad movies. I thought, ‘Didn’t they read the script?’ And then you realise it’s not just a script; it’s not just actors. Sometimes, things get lost in the translation and it can destroy a movie.” That seems to be what has happened here.

The first thing to notice, of course, is that there are no fewer than five credited writers. The first instinct might be to ask how it could possibly take five people to write this, but in fact it tells us a great deal. Each time another writer becomes involved, adding new ideas and making changes to the script, it takes away from the original intention until all that is left is an unfocused mess. This is often, although presumably not always, an indication of studio interference.

The fact that the film is structured and edited in such a way as to make no sense much of the time is another possible indication of studio meddling, suggesting the film may have been re-edited after the fact, possibly to make it more zippy for its intended audience – teenagers deemed to have the concentration span of fruit flies. In this particular case I do not necessarily think that is what happened, although I suspect the film ended up going straight to DVD because the studio lost faith in it, rather than it being the original plan.

The jittery camera and lighting trickery used to signify Karen’s nightmares and visions – and alert us to the “scary” moments – are all rather too obvious and overly-familiar, which is not to say they are not effective. Given that ‘Ring Around The Rosie’ is never going to be considered to be a classic of its genre, these little tricks do work after a fashion. The real problem is that the story defies all logic. Horror films generally do require a suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience, but here there are not so much holes in the plot as one gigantic black hole that sucks everything into itself.

Ultimately, it is possible to explain all the various implausible moments as projections of the nightmares and hallucinations, but the story is never told well enough or with sufficient clarity. Equally, the catalyst for what happens does not seem traumatic enough to explain why the nightmares are so vivid and so disturbing. I thought there were some hints suggesting incest and paedophilia (and possibly physically violent parental abuse), but they are so vague as to be entirely worthless and unhelpful in explaining what is going on.

I recently wrote about a Spanish made-for-television horror film called ‘Películas para no dormir: Para entrar a vivir’ and gave it a faintly mediocre review. However, watching a film like this makes me realise how many things that film got right.

The cast, at least, is fine. Whatever his personal demons and failings as a human being, there is no doubt that Tom Sizemore is a skilled actor and he certainly has no trouble making us believe his character is dangerous, violent and psychotic, although this film could hardly be described as a career high. Gina Philips is best known to me for her effective performance in ‘Jeepers Creepers’. She also had recurring roles in the television shows ‘Ally McBeal’ and ‘Boston Public’. I know of Jenny Mollen, the wife of actor Jason Biggs, from a three-episode run in the fifth and final season of the television show ‘Angel’ and from a one-off appearance in a season two episode of ‘Medium’.

‘Ring Around The Rosie’ does not have much to recommend it. However, my general love of horror films set in spooky houses meant I actually rather enjoyed watching it, despite my criticisms. The absence of gore was a bonus.

The alternative UK title for this film is ‘Fear Itself: Dark Memories’ – the original American working title having been ‘Fear Itself’.


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The Movie Hero

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Rating 2¾


Written and directed by Brad T Gottfred

Starring Jeremy Sisto, Dina Meyer, Peter Stormare, Brian J White, Carlos Jacott, Marcia Strassman, Eric Pierpoint, Frances Bay and Alexis Arquette


Blake Gardner (Jeremy Sisto) believes his life is a movie in which he is the hero and his every move is watched by his own personal audience. He creates a plot, including a “Suspicious Character” (Peter Stormare, who was also one of the film’s executive producers) and a “Sidekick” (Brian J White).

He is sent for psychiatric evaluation and his novice therapist Elisabeth Orlando (Dina Meyer) becomes his “love interest” in his imaginary film. When Blake crosses over the boundaries of doctor/patient relations, Elisabeth’s fiancé Jonathan (Carlos Jacott), a successful novelist, tells him some painful home truths, correctly identifying that his delusions are substituting for his failed dreams of becoming a movie star.

A great many small-budget independent films tend to aim for quirky. Some end up being either very engaging and charming (for example, ‘Juno’), but many are painfully irritating (‘Brick’). The response of the viewer, one way or the other, will always be very subjective and individual. ‘The Movie Hero’ (which is also known as ‘Frame of Mind’) straddles a very fine line between the two. Initially, I found it leaning worryingly towards the irritating, but it gradually pulled me in and became more interesting, particularly during the middle part of the film when the stylised quirkiness began to give way to a slightly darker tone.

To all intents and purposes, this is a rom-com, although it also deals with reality and the nature of fame, as well as acting as a kind of love letter to the magic of films. It is, however, for all its quirks and pretensions, just as formulaic as any mainstream Hollywood rom-com.

The central message the film asks is whether happiness is a delusion. In one particularly wistful scene an elderly woman (Frances Bay) confides to Elisabeth that she hates shopping. As the conversation continues it becomes apparent she has just bought a new dress to wear at the funeral of her husband and is agonising if she has made the right choice. Suddenly, it occurs to her that the dress zips up at the back and tears well up in her eyes as she asks, “Who will zip me up now?”

The main flaw in the film for me is the painfully hammy performance of Peter Stormare. The “suspicious character” would seem to be the link between Blake’s delusional world and the real world as symbolised by his sessions with Elisabeth, but frankly I could not make any sense of what it was supposed to signify.

The film relies heavily on the central character being likeable and engaging rather than annoying and tiresome. Jeremy Sisto manages to achieve this. Sisto has an extensive portfolio of work, including films like ‘Clueless’, ‘Thirteen’ and ‘Wrong Turn’ and regular roles in television shows like ‘Six Feet Under’ and ‘Law & Order’.

In the end, the film is probably too whimsical and too knowingly clever, without actually being quite clever enough. For example, it is no match for Woody Allen’s 1985 film ‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’. Having said that, it has plenty of nice touches and if it doesn’t annoy you it will certainly entertain you.

‘The Movie Hero’ won several awards, including Best Supporting Actress for the ever-reliable Dina Meyer at the Dahlonega International Film Festival.



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Stranger Than Fiction

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Rating 3


Directed by Eric Bross

Written by Tim Garrick and Scott Russell

Starring Dina Meyer, MacKenzie Astin, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Todd Field and Frances Bay


There are all sorts of things wrong with this film (which shouldn’t be confused with the later Will Ferrell film of the same name), but I really enjoyed watching it.

Four friends in Salt Lake City find themselves in an increasingly surreal nightmare scenario when one of them commits murder and the others agree to help to dispose of the body.

For three-quarters of its running length the film is played as a black comedy. The various twists and turns are not especially original and the script is perhaps a little too obvious, but the four leads work well together and make the most of the material.

The sudden change in tempo in the final quarter when the film moves to a new location and the black comedy is discarded in favour of a rather nasty conclusion is somewhat jarring. However, what lets the film down most are the weak bookend scenes that seem to have been borrowed from an episode of ‘Murder She Wrote’ and the director’s annoying insistence on marking scene changes by fading the picture out and in using a decidedly tacky looking colour-negative effect.

These faults aside, this is a very watchable film. I can happily sit down and take 100 minutes out of my time to watch it, something I can’t honestly say about a great many of the films that are clearly of greater “artistic” merit. Not everyone would agree, of course.

“It doesn’t help that the cast deliver mediocre performances. Natasha Gregson Wagner is worse than that, as her acting simply isn’t credible.”
Brian Webster, Apollo Guide: Intelligent Reviews Online



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