Above Suspicion

If you're like me and often frustrated by illogical movie plots (Why do smart people do dumb things in the movies?), then you'll appreciate the ingenious ending to this little film.

You might also appreciate the acting job turned in by the teenager who plays the daughter. She was picked out of a local soft ball team and had no prior acting experience.

I was a very small part of the technical crew on this film - I work for a technology consulting team, our creative services arm did some of the computer screens in this film.

Tiny easter egg, all the names used in inbox scenes throughout the movie are either in-movie characters, or the names of me and my coworkers.

I'm not sure how much I can talk about the details of how the film landed there, but after filming was completed it was shopped around to the cable networks, until it was picked up by USA for airing as a made-for-TV special. It did not see general DVD release, but was released by USA on VHS. A couple years later, it was transcoded to DVD as they were converting their back catalog - I think they went ahead and reformatted and added proper menus and special features as well, but someone who has it should probably comment on that. As a result, it was released to DVD market with very little fanfare, as others have noted.

Personally, I found it in the discount bin at WalMart and that was the first I knew it had been available - I had to track down some friends to find out the story...

Years later, I was working again with the same company when I was invited to take a tour of some of their production facilities - they still had the house from this film mocked up on one of their sound stages (I had never been onset during filming so I had never seen it) - the two story house was actually filmed as two separate one story houses! The second story was raised so someone could be filmed appearing to top the stairs leading up to it... very fascinating to see how they filmed it.

This was actually a pretty okay film. But you can't miss any of it or you'll be @ a total loss. Scott Bakula plays his part well and you feel bad for him that all that stuff is happening to him. The only major problem is the married couple don't seem to really like each other.

So it's Sunday evening and I had nothing better to do... But I was happily surprised by this movie. Scott Bakula undoubtedly makes the movie, but the plot's also not too shabby. It's twisty enough to hold your attention, but straight forward enough to not be too taxing on the old brain cells. Some of the acting is, admittedly, a bit wooden. And I'm not entirely sure who did kill the one guy half way through the film, or why. And why does his wife looks so happy at the end? Something amiss there, I'm sure. Maybe there were going to make a spin-off film about how she did away with him. But still, very pleasing Sunday evening viewing. And now it's time for bed.

The story for this film was a good idea, but it seemed to me that there was just something lacking, perhaps more attention to detail could have been employed. The main character was believable but the relationship between him and his wife was very flat. There was just no chemistry between the actors and I never believed for one moment that the wife loved the husband. Shame really, because how could you not love Scott Bakula!!