I had already noted a low rating for this movie on various sites but the subject matter appealed to me as a fan of Misery, Play Misty for Me, Misery et al so I gave it a go expecting nothing of any shock value and was not disappointed on that front. This film had elements of all three of the aforementioned films but had too few pearls stretched out on a decidedly threadbare string.
Almost immediately the viewer becomes frustrated at the stupidity of Mike and his girlfriend Elizabeth as they take a trip back to his roots where his "intense" - as Mike describes her - ex-girlfriend, Shelby, runs a bowling alley. After meeting some of Mike's friends, Elizabeth decides she wants to follow them on with Mike to the Bowling alley in spite of being informed about the existence of Shelby. After Shelby plies Elizabeth with tequila whilst playing the amiable ex, Elizabeth, keen to make a good first impression on Mike's parents decides she is too drunk to meet with them that night so Mike's police officer brother drives Elizabeth to a remote hotel and Mike back to his folks. This is where the first major flaw of the plot is seen. Would you seriously drop your young girlfriend off in a hotel car park in a strange and remote area without seeing her safely inside and ensuring she has secured a room? Apparently not as she is left to wheel her case in and wave from the door as her chaperones speed off into the night before being told there are in fact no vacancies and the sign that says otherwise is broken. This leaves Elizabeth to walk four miles West in the dark to locate another hotel until she flags down a passing car which promptly knocks her into a ditch.
When she awakens, Elizabeth finds herself in a strange bedroom attached to a drip and being "nursed" by Shelby who is intent on hiding the injured girlfriend away whilst she desperately tries to win back the affections of her ex, Mike. It quickly becomes evident that Shelby is a dangerous psychopath and one wonders why the smart Elizabeth didn't just play along with her games and manipulate Shelby by asserting that she wanted to break up with Mike. A girl of her calibre could have easily cooked up some fictitious and feasible story which would have placated Shelby and ensured Elizabeth's relative safety. This is a common flaw in movies of this ilk. The hostage making ill-planned escape attempts, showing the fear that only feeds the hostage-taker or to the contrary, antagonising their captors and sustaining more injuries for their efforts.
The characters were hard to care about in any capacity which is so often the case where teenagers are involved. Predicable diatribe in my opinion, lacking every ounce of substance that Misery brought to the screen.
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