Ni vue ni connue

We're too far into but, you can still watch something else. This is a joke for a movie.

Yet another made for TV film I wasted my time on. Why bother to cast a British actress and then direct her to use an American accent? Bizarre... Also if her character was in witness protection why didn't she change her appearance in any way whatsoever? Surely that's the first requirement. All in all just another 'woman in peril' vehicle.

Well, well, more cheezola from Grosso-Jacobson, from their ice pick music, trying to pass off Toronto as New York, and bad casting.

Very quickly, the story concerns a real estate broker, Lacey, (Samms) who witnesses the murder of an accident victim's mother. The mother believes it was no accident, and finds her daughter's diary pages to prove it. She gives those pages to Lacey before she dies. The killer is after Lacey, so she is sent into the witness protection program, where she tries to figure out what happened so that she can come home.

"Pretend You Don't See Her" is particularly funny. First, we have the beautiful Emma Samms, as British as they come, who has a sister with no British accent. Right off you know the attention paid to the casting. I don't know about the Mary Higgins Clark story - I like Mary Higgins Clark's novels. Her stuff is a fast read, but Agatha Christie she ain't. I mean, did she really have her main character, played by Samms, act like a MORON? Lacey is in witness protection and her sister begs, pleads for a hint as to where she is. She won't tell anyone. So Lacey (now pretending to be named Alice) gives her a hint which enables her sister to figure out her location immediately. And true to her promise, she doesn't tell anyone. She doesn't have to. She buys a newspaper from that city and has it sticking out of her purse wherever she goes so that EVERYONE can see it.

If only that had been the only dumb thing, but it wasn't.

I gave it a 5 because I got to hear a bunch of Italian tenor arias - Una furtiva lagrima, Di quella pira, La donna e' mobile, and Celeste Aida - playing in a character's restaurant.

I've certainly seen worse movies but this is definitely in the bottom tier. The principals' performances were neither terrible nor great though in a lesser role, Danielle Bouffard's was certainly "fingernails on the chalkboard" for anyone old enough to have memories of that experience. Others have commented on Samms's accent but that was neither here nor there compared to the bizarre behavior of her character. Chased by a known killer, why would she not give the one police officer she trusted any hint of her whereabouts? When she finally figured out what was going on, why didn't she share this info with the police rather than going for confirmation on her own and risking it dying with her? Obviously, because that's what the script called for in the mistaken belief this would build tension. All it did was cause a headache from palming my already palm flattened forehead at the disbelief in the character's stupidity. If you need some neck exercise, this would be OK to listen to while trimming your pet's toenails. You'd be continually burning off calories, shaking your head in disbelief though you could certainly end up with neck muscles that looked like they had too many steroids given how many times they'd get exercised.

As it happens, Pretend You Don't See Her is on the TV right now. However, I had to turn it off and I've come straight on to the IMDb to write this review for it.

Pretend You Don't See her, in the right hands, could have been very good. It's about a woman who is the only witness to a murder, and is then hunted by the killer. In the right hands it could have been good. This was crap though.

It has a very amateur feel to it, and is very obviously a TV movie, a very bad one. The thing that makes it so totally unwatchable? The acting is atrocious. Seriously, it is so bad. Emma Samms, in the lead, is awful, and though at times she is very good, most of the time her line delivery is dreadful.

And I've noticed on a lot of the reviews, people are praising Dani Bouffard's performance, the little girl who played the daughter. Well, reading around, it seems Bouffard has a stage mum, so my only explanation for her good reviews is that maybe her mum got all her friends to say nice things, because in reality, Bouffard's acting is the worst I've ever seen. Child actors are never expected to be that good, but Bouffard is by far the worst. If she wants TV work, she should do commercials were all she's got to do is smile and sat nothing. I mean, who gets shot and smiles as they lay on the ground unconscious? And in the scene that follows her acting is seriously a commercial for how not to act. It is atrocious.

In all, Pretend You Don't See Her is watchable if you aren't put off by things such as the worlds' worst child actor, but if you are the sort of person who notices the bad in movies as well as the good, you will seriously want to steer clear of this one, because they somehow seemed to have rounded up the cream of bad actors, not a single cast member seems to have gone into any depth with their character.

Also, if you are an actor, I beg you not to watch this. You really don't want this sort of acting to rub off on you.