babeulous

This might have been a good story. We picked it on Netflix because the cast was good and it had five stars. The landscapes are beautiful, and the settings and costumes are rich and detailed. They went to the trouble of casting heirloom cows for the cattle drive. Unfortunately the sound is recorded in a style that makes the dialog nearly impossible to hear. Everyone mumbles in an accent, and the voices are mixed much lower than the music or the sound effects. We gave up straining to hear what was going on after 20 minutes or so. Too bad, could have been a good movie. Four stars for Liam Neeson, zero stars for bad sound mixing.

The beautiful blonde on the video box cover is Lucy Frashure playing "Julie Swanson." She registers a credible character: innocent, shocked, terrified. I wonder if she tried acting again under some other name, or gave it up. Ms. Newmann is serious about her role, too. She plays it on two levels, as the scheming evil Satan's agent, but with a hint of playfulness. And I sort-of believed Ms. Rochon's "Madame Natalie." The rest of the cast is just blandly going through the motions.

This picture suffered from a really bad sound track. The music is kind of interesting, but the dialog recording has so much background noise of every kind (fans, blowers, and people walking around on the set, and hum and hiss in the recording) that the dialog is barely intelligible. It began to remind me of a Dr. Who episode, or a daytime soap before they got big budgets. A little ADR would have done a lot for this show. Editing is really loose, too. There's a lot of wasted time between one character's line and the next, which would have been edited out in a more thorough production.

Ten points for Lucy, eight for Amber, five for the script, and none for production.