Thy Neighbor's Wife

The box looked vaguely enticing. A revenge thriller. Well, it wasn't. It was a sorry collection of scenes cobbled together in a fashion that paid, no more than, lip service to the concept of a story line. The only thing that kept my attention was the realization (which came about 20 minutes in) that every female character in the film was going to get her kit off at some stage. Unfortunately, whilst this does happen, these scenes are interspersed between far too much "drama". Having said that, I still think this video would be far more appropriately placed behind the beaded curtain (at the local video store) than out with the serious movies.

The other reviews are quite on-the-money, so I won't go over the same material, other than to state that this movie has to be one of the clumsiest movies I've ever seen.

Things that ought to have been simple to get right, but obviously weren't:

1) The astonishingly well-endowed housekeeper undresses and gets in the shower. Ann (Kari) sneaks into the house, grabs a VERY large kitchen knife, and proceeds to stab the housekeeper to death with blow after blow with the knife. There is NO blood being spattered. She then wraps the body in a white sheet, and is carrying it through the house. Still no blood. At ALL. With the number of times the housekeeper was stabbed, you'd think she'd be draining like a sieve. But apparently she clots REALLY well.

2) Ann manages to empty a full freezer of its contents, put the body in, and refill the freezer, all in the space of about 30 seconds while the daughter is trying to open the garage door. Although the freezer was full when opened, adding an adult womans body and then piling everything on top doesn't seem to add any mass to the freezer.

3) Ann sneaks into her husbands bosses house, turns on the gas, and sets a light to spark when the switch is turned on. The boss is upstairs, but comes down. Comes down a very large staircase. When he turns on the light, the house is shown (exploding) from the outside. The house is clearly one story.

4) Numerous interior shots of the families house also shows it to be two story. Numerous exterior shots of the house show it to be one story. Apparently it is MUCH larger on the inside than the outside.

5) How many times can a person REALLY get hit full-force with a heavy piece of steel and not be killed? Apparently a LOT of times, because both the husband and Ann repeately give each other good solid blows with both a crowbar and a tire iron. Neither one ends up in the hospital. The husband DOES get a minor cut on his forehead, though.

One wonders if the director or producers even watched this movie prior to releasing it.

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.

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.

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)