Unspeakable (2002)

 

Picture: B-     Sound: B-     Extras: C     Film: C

 

 

Sometimes you see films that have great potential and it is missed.  Part of the time, a film simply undermines itself by imitating when it does not need to.  Unspeakable (2002) is another serial killer film, but it offers a psychic twist and a better-than-usual cast.  This begin with the investigator (Dina Meyer, so enjoyable in Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers) who wants to do a detailed profile of another serial killer (Pavan Grover) set to die for his crimes.  Then there turns out to be more going on than expected.

 

There is her helpful mentor and friend (Lance Henriksen), the tough warden (Dennis Hopper), and the corrupt nice guy (Jeff Fahey), but the psychic twist is not in the investigator (as was the case with the blind Uma Thurman in the studio-compromised Jennifer 8 from 1992), but in one who may or may not be the killer.  This can rub off onto other people, including Diana (Meyer), who starts piecing things together she cannot find in regular investigational means.

 

The problem is that the screenplay, written by actor Grover, becomes to derivative of The Silence Of The Lambs and a potentially interesting work goes awry and trashes a good cast.  This is not the fault of director Thomas J. Wright, who should have tried to take more creative control or realize what went wrong.  By the end, what started out as serious becomes a spoof of itself.  Meyer looks too much like Agent Starling, whether it is Jodie Foster or Julianne Moore, who not only sees dead people, but in a video game-like set of visuals.  It is as if the producers gave up in the middle of production and went for bad laughs, if you can call them that.  Later, the film gets unnecessarily gory in a way that seems desperate.  One could ask if Meyer’s character missed al the previous serial killer films.  Even with the good acting, her and you the reader would be better missing this one, especially with its desperate ending.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image is not bad, but lacks some detail that you would expect from even a dark-looking production like this, though cinematographer Antonio Calvache offers nothing memorable visually to begin with.  The sound is here in a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix, but you can tell the low-budget origins of the sound by the dialogue not sounding as clear as it should and especially as compared to the music score.  The Dolby 2.0 is still not as good.  Extras include more gore in some extended outtakes (even the producers knew when to stop, give or a looming the NC-17), eight deleted scenes that would not have helped, two outtakes that are amusing, and several trailers for other MGM DVDs and this film.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo