Ni vue ni connue

Really odd TV-movie from the Mary Higgins Clark plot factory. Oddball international cast does pretty well (for the most part); I don't know if the use of British, Canadian, German, and American actors was a deliberate sop to the multi-culti crowd or just a random occurrence. Anyway, the mystery is quite suspenseful at times, though some of the "twists and turns" are a bit pat. The overall impact is hindered, however, by Emma Samms's strange performance. She was apparently struggling with her American accent: some of her line readings are a bit off, and she uses an inappropriately breathy voice in some scenes that really saps them of tension. There was no intrinsic reason for her to use an American accent anyway; the character could just as easily have been a Brit. Also inexplicable is the (creepy) attention paid below to the little girl--her role is actually small.

I was very underwhelmed with this film from start to finish. Even the attempts to link the film to the title was just poorly executed.

Lacey gets on your nerves with her idiocy and exposing her loved ones and herself. She lacks in the brains department. As soon as she became a target she exposed her sister and niece to danger by visiting them, later she gave up the location of where she was hiding while under witness protection. Also the motive was never really fully explained. Why was Heather killed, what was the story behind these murders.

This is yet another example of a poorly adapted film from Mary Higgins Clark.

A woman witnesses murder and has to go on the run. Some odd characters and awful music, but entertaining enough. I did wonder if what was up with the brother-in-law and there are some amazing recoveries.

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.

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.