The Rockville Slayer

I saw the premiere of Unaware and I'm not sure if they had the final print ready. That might explain some of the problems. The editing was kind of choppy and the story made very little sense. Too much went unexplained or inferred and it veered unsteadily between a slasher film and a Lifetime weeper-film. There's a killer on the loose and the local townies are too busy talking and practicing self-introspection to do much about it. The action sequences are good and definitely some of the performances are clearly much better than the story deserves. The two girls Nicole Buehrer and Amy Brown gave the best performances. The supposed pros in the cast didn't bring their A-game I don't think. Buehrer is a dark beauty with a bright future and Brown is the gal next door with bucket fulls of talent and a nasty knife in this instance. Might be worth a night's rental to see Linnea Quigley again and it future does seem to be in straight-to-video.

Sheriff Duncan (Joe Estervez) sends two of his deputies to investigate the recent rash of murdered teens, while another deputy Charlie, is more interested in his brother who might've been slain by the same murder

If not for the stilted dialog, the disjointed storyline, or the atrocious delivery (the female detective being the worst offender here) and if the three bigger stars got more screen time (Z'dar and especially Linnea are barely much more than cameos) this would've been a pretty watchable film.

Eye Candy: Holly Ilyne Sari gets topless and Linnea Quigley shows T&A briefly, because if she were in any film not showing skin it would be borderline sacrilege at this point.

You know, sometimes you just watch a movie because there is nothing else on television at that time. My friend and I had this DVD and fed it into the DVD player over the weekend because we didn't want to sit and watch all the football games. I think we were both snoozing off by the first 20 minutes or so. I got this movie because I wanted to see Joe Estevez. I met him at a convention 2 years ago and he is really nice. Since then I've watched a few of his movies and they can be decent time-passers. In the case of "Rockville Slayer" I didn't pass much time but I did catch up on some needed Z's.

Joe is pretty good in the movie, playing a sheriff in a tiny town. He brought some real gravitas to his role. I liked the way Nicole Buhrer acted. She kind of reminds me of a young Gillian Anderson kind of actress. But only one or two of the other actors was really believable and the story doesn't pack much oomph to it. When I sat down to watch the movie to completion; it took me 3 sittings to do it. I lost track of the story because the first part is about a murderer girl who escapes from a hospital (Amy Brown, reminds me of Beba in "Blood of the Virgins" running around in her nightgown) and then the rest is some kind of melodrama about one of the sheriff's deputies (this guy wasn't too good). And then in the last parts of it it looked like a dubbed movie because the lips didn't match the words a lot of time. Besides that, everything looks nice but nothing keeps me interested. Oh, the one villain guy (Robert Zdar) didn't look nice, wow, so scary looking. My friend didn't want to watch the rest of the movie when she woke up from her nap. I had to sit through it on my own over the last 2 days.

So all I can say is that someone put a lot of hard work into making this movie but I wish it was better and more interesting. Even after watching the whole thing I am not sure what kind of movie it was supposed to be.

Amazing that an unknown director could get actors with sizable cvs like Estevez, Quigley and Z'dar to appear in a non-film like this. See what you can do if you dangle some dollars in front of people without jobs. If their careers had not already jumped the shark from now on they call check off "Unaware" as the sure spot where the bottom was finally hit. The plot is not so much a story as it is a series of scenes that must of sounded good in the writer's mind but don't translate into anything interesting on the screen. In the beginning they lead you to think a certain character is definitely the murderer but then the plot changes arbitrarily and goes somewhere completely different. Maybe the writer/director thought this was going to be accepted as a plot twist but it is only a cheat because it happens only as one incredible coincidence. Considering the acting, only the no-name actors/actresses seem to care about earning their paychecks. The photography is the best thing about the movie because everything seems to be in focus but there's something unsettling about the sound quality. What story there is centers around some murders in a small town with obvious red herrings and an ending that you can't possibly see coming because its so removed from the story that its a cheat on the audience. Quigley appeared in some good "bad" films in the 80s and 90s exploiting her looks and talent but this is just a bad film in every possible way and its sad to see her slumming in this. Z'Dar's career has been in decline for a long while and this should put the sad exclamation point at the end. Estevez better scratch this one off his resume and stick as close as he can to his employable relatives.

The producers are changing the name from Unaware to The Rockville Slayer: it won't help. I think they are changing the name because this was supposed to be marketed as a psychological thriller about knowing who you really are. That whole idea is completely lost in the clumsy writing, middling acting & unimaginative direction. Maybe now the producers think they are going to exploit the angle of the killer on the loose. But there's no terror inflicted by the slayer here. Each scene is lifted from the b-movie play book and you know who is going to get skewered 5 minutes before each plunge of the knife. There's some nice looking newcomers in the cast and they carry most of the action. If you can call it "action." There's a lot of standing around and talking and crying and self-pity. The lead cop is badly miscast. The veterans in the cast are clearly slumming for a check and probably forgot about their visit to the imaginary Rockville the day after their check cleared. Especially wasted are Joe Estevez and Robert Z'Dar. Haggard ex-scream queen Linne'a Quigley has never looked more tired. Whoever photographed her should never work again. I doubt you will ever hear from anyone else listed in the credits. Not worth a video purchase or a rental. Watch The Town That Dreaded Sundown instead.