Le serpent de septembre

The movie is straight trash but Melissa George is solid. The most interesting thing is how she manages to act with clowns who were picked off the street.

Boston serial killer Max Hersog has been in prison for the last two years. Journalist Kate Fischer (Melissa George) is still villainized for holding back information which could have solved the case earlier. She was not convinced that Max is the September Slayer and a person with that Modus Operandi is hunting again. She is the new ethics professor in a local college and it's causing a scandal. She is still recovering from her divorce and her public battles. Lucas Kelley is the police detective.

This is a murder mystery TV thriller. There are some problems with the production, the writing, and the final section. The production is strictly TV and it struggles to make Montreal locations be Boston. Somebody should be fired for the bad signage work. The writing is problematic. As a mystery, the reveal needs to have more obvious hints. The villains need bigger roles. It doesn't make sense that he kills like the serial killer. Why? This should not be that complicated. It should be formulaic. As for the final section, it makes no sense that the swat team doesn't go into the house first. There are issues with the sequencing of events. Grading on a curve, this fails even as a cable TV movie.

I just had a good laugh at sddavis63's review about wishing he had a second chance to get the last 1 1/2 hours of his life back after watching this. How true! It's funny how a bad movie has warning signs right from the get go and in this case, it was literally a sign in the form of a highway sign. I won't go into the details about the movie because they really don't matter, it's so poorly made that the details don't even matter.

The bottom line is there's this kid in a Canadian movie that's trying to pretend it's filmed in America, and as he's heading towards Boston, there's a highway sign which reads, Cambridge XXX miles and Boston XXX miles, (I'm surprised they didn't goof up and make the sign in kilometers). But the fatal flaw is you can tell the sign isn't real! The fonts are too small and it just clearly looks fake. It reminded me of when Wylie Coyote would see the Road Runner coming and he'd make a fake sign that said 'detour' and would be waiting at the top of a ravine with a giant bolder.

So that's all you need to know, the sign says it all. From there on in it's 1 and a 1/2 hour downhill boulder into a ravine.

By the time "Second Chances" is finished, all you wish is that you had a second chance to live the hour and a half wasted on watching this. This is truly a dreadful movie, composed of a weak cast offering weak performances playing uninteresting characters filled with meaningless sub-plots and a main plot that was poorly developed and not that interesting. It's supposed to be about a former reporter filled with remorse about not helping the police capture a serial killer years before who is suddenly being targeted herself. Why, then, did we need to know about her former marriage - replete with flashbacks? Why, then, did there have to be a past romance between her and the cop on the case? Why, then, did there need to be this irritating professor at the college she's hired to teach ethics in journalism at who adds nothing to the story and offers perhaps the worst performance of a bunch of bad performances? Why, then, did she even need to have a son? And - my pet peeve - why did this Canadian movie have to pretend to be an American movie by placing itself in Cambridge, Massachussetts? (I mean, Kate could just as easily have left Toronto to teach in Peterborough.) On behalf of all Canadians, I apologize to the people of Cambridge for setting such a dreadful movie in your city. Those who put out this movie should now apologize to us all. 1/10

Was anyone responsible for researching the locations? They made it sound awful for the poor little boy who had to move all the way from Boston to Cambridge -- a whole 15 minute by car tragedy. Horrible for the little boy to move all the way from Boston to Cambridge -- a 15 minute trip! There are no new mini mansions with hugh laws and pools in Cambridge MA.

I couldn't watch because it was such a poorly imagined film. Do your research!