PANIC ROOM. (2002) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

PANIC ROOM. (2002) DIRECTED BY DAVID ‘FIGHT CLUB’ FINCHER.
STARRING JODIE FOSTER, KRISTEN STEWART, FOREST WHITAKER, JARED LETO AND DWIGHT YOAKAM.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I love this brilliant home invasion film. I watched it in the cinema in 2002 and was completely blown away by it. It’s a slick thriller that any writers would do well to study if they want to learn about plot, and the plotting of a good, tight story. The film-makers take a simple enough premise as the basis for a story, then just keep ramping up the tension till the whole thing explodes in a massive crisis.

Jodie Foster is excellent as Meg Altman, a recently divorced woman who moves into a fantastic four-storey brownstone in New York City’s Upper West Side. Her millionaire ex-husband is in pharmaceuticals, so he can afford the rent, and he now lives with a supermodel, the prick, after breaking up his marriage.

With Meg is her pre-teen daughter, Sarah, played by a boyish-looking but unmistakable Kristen Stewart from TWILIGHT. The house is miles too big for them, of course. What the hell do a woman and a child want with all that space? The house lends itself perfectly to the plot, however.

On their first night in the huge, largely empty old house, it’s dark, windy, rainy and altogether spooky. Three men break into the house. When Meg spots them purely by accident on the security cameras in the panic room next to her bedroom, she grabs up a sleepy Sarah from the floor above and the pair of them flee for safety to the panic room.

Irony of ironies, the reason the three men have broken in is in the panic room, i.e., a stash of cash or bonds hidden there by the house’s previous occupant, a millionaire. This means that the terrified mother and daughter can’t just sit out the robbery in peace and comfort in their panic room. Those three guys are hellbent on actually coming in…

Forest Whitaker plays Burnham, who installs panic rooms for a living and works for the security company who services this particular house. Jared Leto plays the millionaire’s spoiled, bratty grandson, who’d prefer to steal his Grandpa’s bonds and keep them all for himself rather than wait for everything to be doled out legitimately in the will.

The third guy, Raoul, is a real loose cannon, a thug brought along by Junior. Raoul doesn’t care if he kills or maims anyone on this job, and that’s the difference between him and Burnham. Burnham doesn’t want anyone hurt and is deeply unhappy with the fact that the mother and daughter have moved in to the house a few days earlier than they were expected to.

Burnham is the only thing standing between Meg and Sarah and the nasty ugliness of Raoul’s foul nature and Junior’s greed and impulsivity. Will he come through for them? Add to all of this the fact that Meg gets claustrophobic when in small spaces and Sarah is prone to diabetic comas and needs her glucose injections. From a special bag. Which is not in the panic room. Oh, and Meg hasn’t connected the panic room phone yet…

The tension just keeps being ramped up and up, as I said earlier, until everything all spills over into a breath-taking climax. Jodie Foster, even though I believe she was pregnant at the time, is particularly athletic and throws herself all over the place in a really impressive manner for the duration. I just love the film, anyway, and I have good memories of seeing it in the cinema. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it too. It does exactly what it says on the tin.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
 
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Stops-Sandra-Harris-ebook/dp/B089DJMH64
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1781994234
 
  

THEM, or ILS. (2006) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

THEM, or ILS. (2006) DIRECTED BY DAVID MOREAU AND XAVIER PALUD.

STARRING OLIVIA BONAMY AND MICHAEL COHEN.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I absolutely love this French-Romanian horror movie, but that’s not to say I don’t have my beef with it. It’s the story of an extremely attractive French-speaking couple in their thirties, Clementine and Lucas, who have recently moved to a fabulous old house- I think- in the Romanian countryside.

The old mansion and its deliciously dilapidated garden are the real stars of the film for me, along with the drop-dead gorgeous live-in lover, Lucas, who stabs himself in the leg with a shard of glass like a big fool as soon as the action kicks off.

The house looks like it’s been around since World War Two or even earlier. I’d love to live in a big old sprawling house like that, steeped in history and surrounded by a dense, deep dark woods.

The only problem would be the isolation of the place. Indeed, that’s the problem in the film, that the house is so remote and isolated that there’s no-one to come to the couple’s aid when a group of unknown assailants decide to stage a home invasion one dark stormy night.

The house lends itself perfectly to the terror arising out of a home invasion. It’s dark, spooky, spacious, with loads of twists and turns and cubby-holes and places to hide for both intruders and the intruded-upon.

The house is so big, in fact, that one wonders how a school-teacher- Clementine- and a presumably unemployed wannabe-writer- Lucas- can afford the place. Maybe they got a reduction on the rent because the house is so out-of-the-way?

Anyway, the tension and suspense build up quickly (the film’s only 74 minutes long, so they’ve gotta look sharp) and the scares are super-plentiful as Clementine and the divine Lucas are terrorised half to death in their own home by a group of intruders whose agenda they’re completely unaware of.

I mean, what do these people want, anyway? To rob them? Is it money they want? Are they sexually motivated, as in bent on rape? Or are they just messing with the couple for the hell of it, or for reasons unknown even to us, the viewer? Whatever the motivation for the home invasion, the chase through the house, the attics, the garden, the woods, the sewer and the underground labyrinth, these scenes are all terrific and very, very scary.

Trois problèmes, as the French themselves would say. Un, I was bitterly disappointed with the reveal of the perpetrators, nor did I find them particularly believable as assailants. Deux, the film-makers did not manage to convince me that THEM is based on true events. Check out the extra features and you’ll see why I say that.

Trois, and finally, Le Sexe. As in, there was none. The sight of the muscular, dark-haired dreamboat Lucas naked, flanneling himself in the shower, would have gone a long way towards convincing me to forget my nipples with the film. I mean, my niggles. Pardonnez-moi, I confused myself there for a moment.

Or he could have had nudie sex with the mopey-faced Clementine, just so long as we, the viewers, got a good long flash of muscular French buttocks and thighs. Lucas’s, that is to say, ne pas de Clementine’s, lol.

What’s the French for willy, anyway? I can’t keep calling it Le Thingy. Haha. Just googled it. It’s- you’ll never guess- Le Pénis. What an anti-climax, lol. I suppose the French for vagina is La Vagine. No, it’s la Vagin. Just looked it up. No ‘e.’ Very original, France and the French people, very original, well done for that.

Anyway, a terrifically scary film but you may not like the resolution. And there’s no sex in it. But I still love it for the location and the scares and the atmosphere of sheer dread and terror during the home invasion. So it’s a case of swings et roundabouts, my dear reader, swings et roundabouts.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books.