A Hollywood filmmaker, Tom Kempton, goes wandering on his snowmobile only to fall into the clutches of a couple of crazy old broads who apparently have read Misery one too many times. They strap his a*s to a chair and torture him for a whole before threatening to give him a little ventilation between his eyeballs with a power drill. But his buddies arrive at the last minute, rescuing Tom and spoiling all of our fun, making way for the next phase of the film, which is ripped straight out of the pages of Dario Argento’s giallo wet dreams.
Once Tom is rescued and returned to his Malibu home, he finds that he is obsessed with the physical features of one of his captors. He wants to use her likeliness in his animated feature, so he tracks down the woman’s daughter, who happens to be a struggling actress, and asks that she model for him. The more they work together, the more Tom discovers about the family of his would-be killer and the family tree isn’t a pretty one to look at. So begins his investigation, which finds him in the same deep s**t he was lucky enough to escape from in the first place.
The bulk of this fairly long film (coming in at 117 minutes) has the audience follow Tom’s investigation, feeling like a TV movie version of some of Argento’s murder mysteries like “Deep Red” and “Tenebre.” Alex McArthur, as Tom Kempton, even looks a little bit like David Hemmings from “Deep Red.” But unfortunately, despite a couple of creepy scenes here and there, director John Hancock doesn’t inspire enough interest for us to want to follow Tom on his near two-hour Hardy Boys mystery. More groans than gasps for this one.
