Reasonable Doubt

Glamour model Amber Smith plays Charlie, a detective on the trail of a serial (aren't they all?) killer in this run-of the-mill erotic thriller. The killer has all the hallmarks of a killer known as The Baptist, but he was killed a year previously by Charlie. Has he come back from the dead? Was he the wrong man? If you have seen this type of film before then you have probably guessed the outcome with its twist at the end, but at leas there are some hot nude scenes to stir the blood. This though, is not really enough to compensate for the terrible camera-work.

The problem is with the director, Eric DelaBarre who uses all sorts of camera gimmickry in the course of the film - and too many times. We get fast motion, quick-fire montages, zooming, but the worst aspect is the shaky camera - it's too much. Hint to all film-makers: just because you have lots of buttons, switches and knobs on your cameras and editing suites, it is not compulsory to use them all. In conclusion, the eye-candy is, well, eye-candy but as for the rest of the film, no thanks.

Beautiful LAPD detective Amber Smith and her male partner investigate a series of murders that appear to have been committed by a serial killer known as "The Baptist". But Smith had already killed "The Baptist" one year earlier. Did she kill the wrong man or is this the work of a copycat? In the course of the investigation, Smith and her partner have an encounter with an eccentric female sex therapist, and that whole sequence seems totally absurd at the time, but it builds some sexual tension between the two women which later erupts in a VERY HOT lesbian scene in the therapist's luxurious pool. If this movie is worth renting at all, it is for that scene alone. Smith is less than believable as a cop, but she's not aggressively bad. The real problem with "Crime Scene" is that it has been badly overdirected. The rapid zooms, the freeze-frames, the shaky camera and all those other gimmicks that DellaBarre uses call attention to themselves and add nothing to the film. Really annoying - and DellaBarre doesn't let up on it for a minute. Maybe he thought he was the next Oliver Stone or something. (*1/2)