Bad Karma

Interested to see the demise of Patsy Kensit, I decided to pick this movie up from the video store. After dusting the video box (for some reason people are afraid to watch this,) I popped the movie in and was found myself disturbed for the next ninety minutes. This is so bad, I have a new respect for summer movies.

The story is about a mental patient who goes after her doctor while he's on vacation with his family. As she makes her way, she let's it be known that she likes to be seductive just before murdering the people around her. The reason she's going after her Doctor is because in their past lives he was Jack the Ripper and she was his mate. The movie's climax is at the beginning. A gas attendant peeps at a school girl (a school girl whose chest would make Michael Jackson's nose look natural) who is changing in his restroom. He then decides to kidnap her and tell her that she killed him in a past life. They almost have sex.

Have I said that I want my ninety minutes back?

This film starts very well for a B movie with a beautiful blondie nude scene. After she strips in the bathroom of a gas station she's kidnapped and tortured by a maniac. Then the movie jumps in time and shows Patsy Kensit playing the same character as the unknown blondie in the beginning (they explain that she made a plastic surgery, but most probably she didn't want to show her body off). She's a psycho woman in a mental institution who manages to escape with some nice kill shots. In the first 15 minutes we get nudity and some gory death scenes. After that the film becomes predictable and finally boring, very boring. The plot about Jack the ripper reincarnation is ridiculous. I suggest you watch the movie until the psycho girl escapes and then turn off the TV.

This is one of those sorry little efforts in which everyone – from minor characters right up to the director – is clearly just going through the motions, working for their pay-packet and nothing else. The director is John Hough, a veteran who, although something of a journeyman, has some good efforts under his belt (TWINS OF EVIL, DIRTY MARY, CRAZY LARRY) so he really has no excuse for producing such a shoddy piece of work. And as for the editing, well, IMDb doesn't even list an editor amongst the crew, which probably tells you all you need to know. I can only think that Hough is either very brave or very foolish to refrain from adding another dud to Alan Smithee's ever-growing CV with this one.  

The story opens ten years in the past. A garage attendant, after spying on a naked teenage schoolgirl in the garage's washroom, abducts her. After stripping and tying her to a bed, he attaches electrodes to her wrists and proceeds to torture her. Now if this girl's acting was half as hot as her body, her mantelpiece would be groaning under the weight of her Oscars – and if her body was as lousy as her acting this would be a horror to put all those 70s Italian cannibal flicks in the shade. With God knows how many volts zipping through her body, our naked teen merely winces, says ow, and fetchingly jiggles her boobs. This girl, however – who also appears to be mysteriously absent from the credits – is merely setting the standard that the rest of the cast will follow throughout the movie – although it has to be said that Patsy Kensit is marginally less bad than the others (and when Patsy Kensit is the best thing about a movie, you know it's in trouble…).

Anyway, the reason the poor lass has been abducted is that, in a past life, she was Jack the Ripper's squeeze, helping him to find and disembowel cockney prostitutes, and the garage attendant was one of their female victims. Now he has found her in modern-day America – which is easier to believe than is the fact that the makers actually found financing for this barmy flick – and is electrocuting her in order to retrieve her memory of her previous life before he kills her. Our wronged former streetwalker just can't resist sampling the morsel on his bed, however, which of course leads to his/her undoing: the young girl frees one wrist, unscrews the strut of the bed's headboard, magically frees her other hand and whacks the slobbering pump attendant over the noggin before then apparently retying her wrist so that she can then untie it all over again.

And, believe me, thanks to the copious female nudity this is the best bit of the movie (sorry, ladies).

There is a kind of trashy appeal to some of these sex and gore flicks – this one's a little like something a mediocre student of Michael Winner's might make if the old boy had turned to teaching movie-making instead of appearing in insurance adverts on TV – but the repeated lapses in logic and continuity, coupled with the bad acting (that isn't quite bad enough to be amusing) from a cast who play it straight, and the stupid decisions made by every single character, prevent the viewer from gaining even guilty pleasure from it. Even the location grates: the movie is supposed to take place in Rhode Island, but was clearly filmed in Britain - most likely some godforsaken island off the Scottish coastline by the look of it.

Anyway, the attendant's electrocution theory proves to be right on the button, as Jack's moll is restored to consciousness in the teen's body and we next see her in the present day – now in the form of Patsy Kensit – strapped to a bed in a mental hospital, and convinced that her doctor (Patrick Muldoon) is the reincarnation of Jack. Funny how all these Victorian killer types gravitate toward the States in their new lives. Naturally, it's not long before she is on the loose, killing everyone she comes across, often stabbing them repeatedly before somehow washing and repairing their clothes so that she can wear them to make her escape from the scene.

There's no two ways about it: this is bad movie-making, and can serve only as a cautionary message to aspiring movie makers: this is how not to do it.

This movie seems to depend on blood, guts and gore. After the initial scene in which so much of the woman is seen without clothes, there is very little nudity and plenty of blood, guts and gore. The story seems to have written to support showing it.

One thing that everyone seems to be missing is that so many people are killed. We are supposed to feel for some and not care about others. However that is one of many things that make it difficult for me to enjoy them.

There are a few times in this movie when the police could have been and should have been called yet they were not. This was probably also done by the writer because it was an easy way to maintain the drama. Producers will continue to make movies with plots like that until more people complain.

There is several reasons as to why this is so bad and silly but when you have a veteran director like John Hough there is just no excuse. Hough has directed such films as "Twins of Evil", "Dirty Mary,Crazy Larry" and "Legend of Hell House". All good efforts, so what happened here? My guess is that the script was so bad no director could have saved it and the studio took hold of it and maybe added scenes. The beginning scene makes me believe this. A beautiful blond girl is undressing in a garage restroom, kidnapped, then tortured to believe the whole Jack the Ripper story. The girl looks nothing like Patsy Kensit but its suppose to be her before plastic surgery! Obviously the scene was put in just to get a nude woman in the film. This film is suppose to be in the Providence, Rhode Island area but obviously its not. Some of the actors have a difficult time hiding their accents and where do you find an old castle in this country? Of course its England. The music sounds just like something from a "Friday the 13th" movie and it should. Harry Manfredini did a lot of those films and he did this one also. Not much happened to Patsy Kensit after appearing with Mel Gibson in the second "Lethal Weapon" film. She really shows nothing here except her name. Its sad to watch. The film is so routine that you have to wonder why anyone would bother? Its badly acted and the story is horribly told. It seemed to me that no one had any real reason to try and do something exceptional with the material. A tired effort by all.