My final film for June was Untraceable (2008). A psychological crime thriller about a serial killer live streaming his murders. Based on the premise alone, I was not expecting much from this week’s pick. And I was pleasantly surprised. This one was very enjoyable, albeit a little slow paced in the first act. I had a good time kicking back and watching this at home with a couple of beers and some kettle corn.

After the slow-ish pacing of the first act, the rest of the movie felt very well put together. It used a lot of interesting shots, the lighting was very moody and set the tone well, the acting was good to great, I don’t have much negative to say about this one (surprising for a guy like me, I know). Except for one glaring issue I had with it in the third act, but I will get to that when the time is right later on in my review.

The movie stars Diane Lane as FBI Cyber Agent Jennifer Marsh. She is a single mother who works nights so she can have the days with her daughter. Her colleague, Griffin Dowd (Collin Hanks) is also a personal friend to her. I really enjoyed his character, up to a point. The premise, as I stated earlier, is that there is a new serial killer on the scene who has set up a website to live stream the deaths of his victims. The more viewers he gets, the faster they die. The first victim is strung up and injected with a blood thinner so he eventually bleeds out. Every viewer added to the stream injects more of the blood thinner into him. The second is burned alive with heat lamps, the more viewers, the hotter they get. Each time he kills someone, he dumps the body at a main character’s house as a message to the FBI that’s actively hunting him down. 

I realized I lied earlier, I have two issues with this movie. The first being that the killer is able to hack into the FBI’s computer system to force them to watch the live stream each time he has a victim. Coinciding with this, the amount of gear and equipment needed for each of his killings is kind of absurd. It takes a willful suspension of disbelief to let all of this slide, the fact he is breaking and entering and stealing all of this from various places without being caught had me as the viewer questioning how one man can do so much.

Griffin, who is a well meaning, and decently intelligent character throughout the first half of the movie, ends up getting caught in a fairly idiotic way. The killer, Owen Riley (Joseph Cross), uses a voice changer to pretend to be the girl that Griffin is interested in dating, and then the next scene shows Griffin in the killer’s basement. I wish they had shown more here, we see Griffin on the phone in one scene and immediately captured in the next. I was a tad upset with this whole sequence, but it was fitting for the story overall.

The other thing that upset me was Diane’s characterization in the third act. She is a well trained tenured FBI agent, and she kind of loses it in this act. There’s a scene where she is hiding out at a hotel after the killer sets up a camera outside of her house to spy on her. Her colleague, Agent Box (Billy Burke, friend of the blog), shows up with food for her to make sure she’s still eating. He knocks on the hotel room door while announcing himself. She grabs her gun and walks over to the door, as the camera pans by, we see a peephole on the door. Instead of using that to verify who is at her door, she steps to the left, almost fully in front of the window and pulls the curtain back to peer out of it. This whole sequence was laughably bad. If that was the killer on the other side of the window/door, she would have gotten got right then and there. 

As the third act progresses, the killer hacks into her car, disabling the electronics systems while she’s relocating to a new location from the hotel. He’s even able to disable her cell phone (none of this is explained for the viewer, it’s all just within his power). She gets out of the car and uses a roadside emergency phone to contact the police/FBI. THEN she makes the biggest and most egregious mistake of the entire movie. She GETS BACK IN HER CAR. The whole time that this was happening my girlfriend and I were yelling at the screen “DON’T GET BACK IN YOUR CAR LADY!” but of course, she does, and of course, the killer is now in the backseat with his taser. So he captures her.

He strings her up over an active spike aerator for a lawn, and the more viewers that join the live stream, the faster she falls headfirst into it. He of course gives a fairly cheesy monologue during this entire sequence, and she starts swinging back and forth and is able to not only fight him off, but free herself simultaneously. The movie ends with her shooting him multiple times.

I understand that at this point, the story is over. But I felt it was still a very abrupt cut to credits. The movie actually just ends at this point, with her laying on the ground, still on the live stream, and the killer’s dead body next to her. Despite the story being wrapped up and finished, it still feels like there could have been a few more minutes at the end actually wrapping it up.

Overall, this movie was fairly well done, I enjoyed watching it, it’s a good popcorn thriller for at home viewing. If you like movies in this genre, I would recommend this one to you for sure.

– 3 mallards /5

-Seann

Bad Tidings (2024) is a British TV film (meaning that it was never seen in a theater, and also that it doesn’t conform the typical 90 minute run-time of a theatrical release) and, what’s worse, is a Christmas movie. These are a couple of firsts for me on the blog. I’ll be honest, I’m not quite sure how to approach this one, because I’m rather unfamiliar with the conventions and overall quality of British made-for-TV Christmas movies. This could very well be the greatest British Christmas TV movie of all time, and I’d never know. I’ll be approaching this, therefore, as I would any other movie, and I’ll not mention the abbreviated runtime (which was rather merciful of them).

This was the literal last pick of the draft this month, largely I believe due to the fact that it is clearly a Christmas movie (the cover and title make this obvious), and maybe in some small part to the fact that neither of us had ever heard of it. We’re not British, so why would we have? Normally I try to go into movies with an open mind; I always at least give the movie an opportunity for me to like it before things go south (if they do). I will admit that it was difficult for me to extend this to this particular movie – I’m generally anti-Christmas movie, and the plot synopsis just seemed like Christmas with the Kranks (2004) and Home Alone (1990) smashed into one British comedy.

Luckily, this wasn’t the nightmare that I thought it would be. I also wouldn’t say this was a great film by any means, and the assessment of the mash-up I made in the prior paragraph was actually spot on. This movie was legitimately funny at times, largely due to an important detail that was left out of the synopses that I read – one of the main characters is blind, but is the leader of the neighborhood watch. I would say this detail is the biggest contributor to the overall comedy of the movie.

This movie did a few other things right, as well. The two main characters, while one of them is rather cartoonish (more on this to come), are largely likeable and we root for them mostly. The other folks in the town are caricatures, and are largely unimportant. Many of them are on screen for 30 seconds at the most. Why are they likeable? I guess because they’re funny-ish, they’re the two people we have the most information about, and one of them is a good actor. Do their decisions make a lot of sense? No, not really. Are they realistic? Also no, but I’m not sure that’s something we can hold against them in what is ostensibly a silly movie to watch on Christmas Eve night.

The plot, while incredibly scarce past the 20 minute mark, is engaging enough to keep the viewer on the hook. For a movie that is made for TV and therefore has a shorter runtime, it’s very important that scenes, especially scenes that are only there to further the plot, do not overstay their welcome. This movie does a surprisingly good job of setting the stage, introducing the major (and minor) players (with the exception of the bad guys), and then not getting in the way of the action (which is lifted directly from Home Alone). I know that’s a lot of parenthetical caveats all in a row, but I think it’s still a solid observation.

When I say “the action” I mean that in a pretty loose turn of phrase. The entire second act (which makes up about 50 of the 80 minute runtime) is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game in which it’s difficult to remember what all is going on. Characters seem to be in danger or caught somewhere that they shouldn’t be able to get out of, and then somehow appear when we least expect them. There are some phone-related gags, a lot of slapstick, and a lot of buffoonery on the part of the bad guys. If the Brits had never seen Home Alone (1990) then they might think this sort of thing was pretty original.

The other biggest downside of this movie is the acting of one of the main characters, the one who is not blind. His character is so gratingly stupid, self-centered, and immature that it makes it difficult to root for him, and his moment of epiphany is completely unearned. In a movie of non-realistic events and characters, he is the least realistic and also the least likeable. It also doesn’t help that the actor really hammed up the role, using all kinds of weird baby voice inflections, dramatizing his movements, and just generally being a knob (shoutout England). It feels like one of the actors thought they were making an entertaining TV movie that should be funny at times and the other actor thought they were making a tryhard comedy (a la Unfrosted (2024)) and had to overact as much as possible.

I would usually also touch on things like the set design, the wardrobes, etc. but there’s really not that much to discuss in this one. This is a movie (again, made for TV) in which any sort of attempt at artistry, such as interesting angles, lighting, cinematography, etc. would only get in the way of the entertainment. I’ve complained previously about the glossy and “perfectness” of the made for Amazon or Netflix movies and how it robs the films of any sort of personality – looks as though that applies to British made for TV movies as well. What a shame.

Bad Tidings (2024) has a score of 5.5 out of 10 on IMDB, a Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer score of 75%, and a Letterboxd score of 2.5 out of 5. The tomatometer score is a bit inflated because I feel like that rating system is based upon watching the movie in a certain context. As said before, this is a fine movie to watch in the evening on Christmas Eve, or a lighthearted film to watch on Christmas afternoon that won’t make you think too hard and will elicit some genuine laughter. For what it is, it’s really not bad, and accomplishes its goals nicely – those goals are just rather narrow. I’m dead-on with the Letterboxd folks on this one (again).

2.5 mallards/5

-Maxwell