Thy Neighbor's Wife

What we have here is a dumbed down, (seemingly) made for TV, version of the nineties thriller 'The Hand That Rocks the Cradle'. The main reason I saw this, aside from the fact I seem to have something of a penchant for stupid and rather dull thrillers, is the fact that it stars Kari Wuhrer. Her name might not mean a lot to a lot of people, but she's about the closest thing we've got a B-movie queen nowadays (although she really does need to get a better agent!). As mentioned, the plot pretty much rips off The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, although this time there is a different reason for revenge and the unfortunate woman at the centre has a different affliction. Wuhrer plays a woman upset after her husband killed himself due to his work colleagues. She takes it upon herself to get revenge, killing a couple of them, before posing as a maid for another. She worms her way into the family through each of the different members, all the while plotting her sweet revenge.

The thing that makes this film fun is the fact that it's completely ridiculous! The acting is terrible, and there are several sequences that are just far too convenient and/or don't make any sense at all! The film is directed by Jim Wynorski, who made Chopping Mall in 1986 before going to make a load of made for video crap, like this film. Some of the soft porn from his other films has made it into this one, and while we don't get to see much; there are plenty of breasts on display to keep things interesting. Kari Wuhrer gives by far the best performance and single handily makes the movie worth watching. She's always nice to look at, which cant really be said for the overall experience of watching this movie; but it is nice to see Re-Animator's Barbara Crampton on screen again. The plot is fairly standard stuff and although there is some attempt to build the characters, it is all a bit hard to care about. It doesn't take a genius to work out what will happen in the end, but there's plenty of laughs (for wrong reasons, mostly) on the way and while this is pretty crap, it's nice, gentle viewing and I did rather enjoy wasting time on it.

Yes, you heard me right. This film is very highly overrated, and given that it enjoys a 3.7 rating at the time of this writing, that should tell you all that you need to know about it. Maybe it is the gratuitous display of enlarged breasts that caused no less than seven people to give it a ten out of ten. It certainly cannot be the dialogue, which is about as stilted as one can get. Nor could it possibly be the acting, as the cast here make the Days Of Our Lives or Home And Away alumni look good.

Then there's the plot devices. Any film that uses diabetes as a plot device, especially to attempt the murder of a character, automatically gets a thumbs-down from me. Having lived with the condition for seventeen years now, I can tell anyone who hasn't seen an example of it that it takes a lot more than our antagonist does to use someone's diabetes to kill them. It becomes quite clear from the prop syringes used in this film, as well as the fact that the diabetic stereotype (one cannot call these things characters) never checks what her blood glucose level is, that makes it clear the writers here did exactly no research into the condition. Oh, and before I forget, replacing the contents of a 10ml bottle of insulin with saline using a .5ml syringe cannot be done in a matter of minutes, or even an hour. That's one for the goof list.

I had to add this, but I have no trouble believing that nobody in the past twenty years, under the age of fifty, has died from diabetes. Gloria Foster was sixty-eight when she died, and even then, I doubt that her diabetes was the sole factor. It would take a deliberate effort on the victim's part, and one that could not possibly be sustained in light of the incredibly painful symptoms of hyperglycaemia (a word I am sure the writer here has never heard).

One will also note that while this character's synthetic insulin is replaced with saline, and her food spiked (both of which would be impossible to do without escaping notice), she still moves like a gymnast. When one's blood sugar is as high as is implied in one scene, it doesn't just make one feel heated. It makes one feel as if their bones have been hollowed out and filled with ground-up glass. This, and a few blood glucose tests, would invoke a visit to the hospital, which would absolutely defeat the purpose of this scheme.

About an hour into the film, we all drop pretensions and wind up with what is essentially a porn film without the money shot. The horrible background music makes it abundantly clear that the distributor who picked this turgid effort up is also responsible for such stinkers as All The Rage or 2001: A Space Travesty as well as such soft porn crap as Illicit Dreams 2. In short, this is an effort from a porn producer who wants to look vaguely respectable.

In my parlance, a rating of two out of ten is a damning score. This is mainly because it indicates a film that is not bad enough to be good in a reversed sort of way, but rather just plain bad. It is not as offensively awful as some of the stinkers I have rated here, but it is not that far off.

This movie is a direct rip-off of "Scorned", which in turn was itself a direct rip-off of "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle"; they even hired an Andrew Stevens lookalike to play the husband. To give you an idea of its quality, I will elaborate on the "bloodless" murder a previous reviewer talked about, and tell you that it must also be the first stabbing in the history of cinema that is executed without a knife! Yes, I swear, play the scene frame-by-frame and you'll see that when Wuhrer is supposed to be stabbing the housemaid to death, she isn't actually holding anything! Maybe that explains the lack of blood. But that's not all; the dialogue that's used to show us how the family is in a constant state of crisis is forced, awkward and delivered at the most inappropriate moments. The script is totally by-the-numbers, with every plot point telegraphed in advance (the "evil woman" seduces the father and the son, makes friends with the daughter, causes health problems for the mother, etc.). Despite all that, the film IS ultimately worth seeing, for one reason alone: Kari Wuhrer. With her pretty face, voluptuous and supple figure, and insinuating voice, she manages the no-small-feat of being just as sexy when she is dressed as when she is naked. She certainly blows Shannon Tweed out of the water in any case. (*1/2)

This movie is truly bad and I can safely say that it is one of the worst films I have watched this year! This film plays more like a bad soap than a thriller. The plot is badly thought out, the dialog is stilted and the acting is wooden at best. Kari Wurher was the only good thing about this movie and even she struggled to give it any life. It includes several gratuitous sex scenes which consist mainly of closeups of silicon enlarged breasts and which have very little to do with the plot. This may of course appeal to a number of people into porn flicks but to most of us it is just down right annoying. Maybe the writers got confused and thought they were still writing a soft-core porn title? Give this one a miss, it is not worth it!

Not much of a thriller to me, this movie was very hard to understand. Anna Stewart is the wife of a business man who just lost his job to a woman from the Garrett family. Anna's husband later dies in a car accident and Anna avenges his death. She kills her husband's old boss, and then heads to the Garrett home. Anna kills the housekeeper and then takes on the housekeeper's job. What happens afterwards is very hard to understand, Anna has sex with the men in the family and slowly kills the mother of the Garrett family. This is one of the strangest movies I have ever seen. I don't recommend you watch this movie unless you want to see a lot of nudity, if you do want to watch a movie similar to this one, I would recommend that you watch Basic Instinct. Don't waste time with this so called thriller.