Chabert Horror Watch! The Ghost of Goodnight Lane (2014)

Watched:  04/27/2025

Format:  Tubi

Viewing:  First

Director:  Alin Bijan

Goodnight Lane is a very real street in northwest Dallas, where the Ghost of Goodnight Lane (2014) takes place, and was filmed, at least in part.  And if there's one spooky thing in this world, it is Dallas sprawl and suburbs.

The best thing about this movie is that Billy Zane is having a good time.  He knows what this movie is, and he's just happy to be there and dick around.  And, really, this movie is just an excuse for the filmmakers to have a good time and make a low-stakes horror-comedy.  It is silly.  It knows it's silly.  It is critic and taste proof.  If you don't like it, that's kind of on you, audience.  And the fact this exists in this form is proof I don't know how movie-making works.

The Ghost of Goodnight Lane is weirdly full of B to Z list working actors out of LA.  I say this, because this movie has the vibe that it doesn't feel like it should have anyone in it but local talent from the DFW area.  But it has Billy Zane and Lacey Chabert.  And still manages to look like a movie shot by people playing with equipment more than a movie that came out in 2014.  Like, it's weird to see real actors in set-ups and with lighting I associate with movies made by folks usually casting their pals, just something fun to enter into horror film festivals.  

It's maybe not Ouija Shark bad, but... 

So I wonder about the proposition for getting the financing - provided our writer/ director didn't finance himself. Did they blow it all on getting who they got?  The FX?  Which are brief but pretty okay for what this is?

Coogler Watch: Sinners (2025)

Watched:  04/26/2025

Format:  Drafthouse

Viewing:  First

Director:  Ryan Coogler

I guess Marshall is my "there's a vampire movie out, we're going" buddy.  And, really, Marshall was the ideal movie buddy for this one.  He's an avid music fan, a musician, and his rock sensibilities - when I met him in the early 1990's - were blues-based.  He's also a fan of vampire flicks, although I don't think I've convinced him to watch the Hammer vampire flicks yet. 

In addition, Marshall is well-read, and with an academic background in creative fiction, his critical analysis is always impressive.  But he refused to send me a blog post for this movie so that I didn't have to write one.  He is refusing me this one simple request, and so I am hoping if I butter him up enough with this high praise, next time, he'll do it.

Anyway - count me in with the people who loved Sinners (2025), and am excited about seeing it again.

SPOILERS

Chabert Watch! Mean Girls (2004)

Watched:  04/25/2025

Format:  Paramount+

Viewing:  second

Director:  Mark Waters

Back when we were doing the podcast, we should have done this movie as part of our "high school movies series".  Alas, we didn't get to it.  

But if you listened to those episodes, you would have come across my inability to access a lot of high school movies, largely because I felt they offered a false proposition:  that in high school, there existed a clique people aspired to join or who were a group to emulate or who had influence.  And that those people were varying levels of mean.

I have since learned:  no, man, that may have just been you (me).    Maybe because I moved to a new school and no one explained to me who was supposed to be "popular".  And if that was going to shake out at the first high school I attended, I missed it gelling as I moved away after Freshman year.

So, that was my context the first time I watched this.  I've kind of accepted since that some people very much felt in and out of groups in high school, and carry that feeling for life.  I think it's why everyone - if you ask them - will tell you how they were an outsider in high school, but the math doesn't add up.  You can't have 99% outsiders.  And I've never heard anyone say "actually, I was super cool in high school".

Noir Watch: Tension (1949)

Watched:  04/26/2025

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  lol

Director:  John Berry

Whoops, I watched Tension (1949) again.

In my defense, it stars both Audrey Totter and Cyd Charisse and I really had no choice.

Chabert Watch: In My Sleep (2010)

"genuinely suspenseful"

Watched:  04/25/2025

Format:  Tubi

Viewing:  First

Writer/ Director:  Allen Wolf

Oh my.  Spoilers.

This is an entire movie about a guy who should have done very obvious things when confronted with monumental problems.  But then we would not have a movie.

I get it.  This is a movie that started as someone's desire to create a "Hitchockian" mystery thriller, found a premise, and worked backward from there.  The premise no doubt started as "how do you tell a story about a guy who needs to solve a murder, but he may have committed said murder himself?"  Ah ha!  I saw cartoons. Sleepwalking.  Sleep driving.   Sleep sexing!  This guy does it all!

The first obvious thing - He kinda/ sorta begins to seek treatment for this condition with medication at the beginning of the film - but only after he somehow sleep-sexes his best friend's wife.  Btw, she's far from the first woman he's apparently had luck with whilst sleepwalking, we're told.*  Also: He's been driving.  He's been wandering around in his undies.  He is a mess.  He keeps waking up in odd places.  With 0% bodyfat.

After a birthday party, attended entirely by his married pal and women he has slept with (I mean... honestly... why?) Our Hero learns the best friend's wife was murdered and found by his father's grave.  Kinda sus.

Chabert Watch! Fatwa (2006)

love the US flag pine tree deodorizer.  Feels very 00's

Watched:  04/23/2025

Format:  Midnight Pulp

Viewing:  First

Director:  John R. Carter

An absolutely bizarre movie that sees the intersection of 

• the 1990's and 00's-era post Pulp Fiction crime flicks
• the success of shows like 24
• the belief that shooting on consumer video will lend an immediacy to the film (this is not correct)
• a first time director
• established actors
• unyielding pretentiousness

all in one neat package that winds up as one of those 90 minute movies that seems like it's been at least two hours, and so you check, and it's got another 30 minutes to go...  It's also one of those movies where everything seems very disconnected and then wants to make everything tie together in the last 20 minutes or so, but when put together, just starts stretching credulity way past the breaking point.

Fatwa (2006) is a post 9/11,  post fall of Iraq indie thriller/ political commentary.  It follows a desperate would-be terrorist in DC who is planning *something* - it's hinted at early on he's going to make a nuclear device using household objects.  He's specifically targeting a US Senator played by Lauren Holly.  (Holly is also an Executive Producer, but I assume that was her negotiating and more of a ceremonial role.)

Noir Watch: The Set-Up (1949)

we always stan Totter and Ryan

Watched:  04/21/2025

Format:  Noir Alley on TCM

Viewing:  fourth?  fifth?

Director:  Robert Wise

It's been years since I watched The Set-Up (1949), and while reading Eddie Muller's new book, an updated Dark City Dames - a collection of bios of several stars of the noir movement, I was pondering rewatching it when TCM's Noir Alley showcase went ahead and programmed the film for last weekend.  

It's no secret we're fans of stars Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter, or director Robert Wise.  But because Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter aren't really household names, and it's a grimy boxing picture of its surface, I'm not shocked if you haven't heard of or seen this one.  

The film comes in at a taught, trim 73 minutes.  And, novel for its era, the movie unspools in an approximation of real-time - taking place in one night of crisis for an aging boxer and his wife, who can't take watching him get beaten every night.  Not anymore.

Horror Watch: I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

Watched:  04/21/2025

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jacques Tourneur

I Walked With a Zombie (1943) is @#$%ing *great*.  Holy cats.  I'm mad at myself I took so long to see it.

Fun fact:  apparently I finished watching this movie on the 82nd anniversary of the film's release.  How about that?

More than a decade after White Zombie - an okay movie that I think drags - RKO put this one out.  It's considered part of a retrospective high point for RKO as Val Lewton was producing cheap and effective thrillers.  

Apparently the title is lifted from an article by journalist Inez Wallace who spent time in Haiti and met people who were basically without will thanks to drugs.  It also borrows a bit from Jane Eyre, one of my favorite reads from college days.

The movie is a Gothic mystery set on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian.  The beautiful wife of a sugar plantation owner has fallen into an odd stupor, able to be given commands, but she's otherwise lifeless, emotionless... mostly still unless directed to move around.  Frances Dee plays a nurse brought from Canada to care for her - and expects she's being asked to live in paradise, but like a character from Bronte, Byron or Poe - the husband of the "zombie" sees only death on the island. 

There's a riddle for what really happened.  Two brothers at war.  A mother who is remote from them.  

The location of the plantation leans into the history of the cruelty of slavery and the family's part in what happened, keeping the haunting figurehead from one of their slaveships on the premises, a tortured man impaled with arrows - a reminder of what they did.  Pretty wild as elected leaders are, in 2025, trying to erase slavery of all things from our history books.  The family has tried to make amends now in the mid-20th Century, seeing themselves as stewards of the history and the people here, not interfering, but making sure people are healthy and the plantation provides an economy.

Chabert Watch! Christian Mingle The Movie (2014)

Watched:  04/19/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First (and Last)

Director:  Corbin Bernsen

Job:  Ad company exec

new skill:  being brainwashed

Man: Jonathan Patrick Moore

Job of Man:  I don't know if I ever figured that out

Goes to/ Returns to:  Eventually goes to the Yucatan

Event:  several

Food:  Sushi

This is a movie about a mentally ill person who falls prey to a cult through a recruitment scheme posing as a dating site for Christians.  

Designed to be mistaken for a Hallmark movie, this infomercial for ChristianMingle.com (a very real dating site), our film - Christian Mingle The Movie (2014) - follows Lacey Chabert as a VP of Brand Management for a small advertising company.  She's unlucky in love, and is absolutely freaking out that, at age 30, she's still unmarried.  

The movie is written and directed by Corbin Bernsen, and so I have to lay a lot of blame at his feet, but also know he was having to make a movie for people who are maybe not really aware of how some of the things they wanted in their movie would play.  The film does have appearances by the eternally lovely Morgan Fairchild, Brian Keith, Stephen Tobolowsky, Bernsen, John O'Hurley and one actress I remember who was really pushed on us in sitcoms like 15 years ago.

On the surface level, it's a romantic comedy/ drama about a woman finding God while also finding a Good Man.  

On a meta level, this movie is essentially a warning shot to accomplished women who are being told they're a failure without a man.  Beware: you will have your entire life destroyed by people pretending good will but who will throw you away without batting an eye.

Noir Watch: The Steel Trap (1952)

Watched:  04/19/2025

Format:  Noir Alley on TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Andrew L. Stone

This one is a wild ride.

Look, I just like Joseph Cotten.  The man is a movie star, but also can be an everyman like no one's business.  And he was absolutely the right choice to be our lead.

He plays a sort of middle-management salary man at a bank, knows all the in's and out's, and is married to Teresa Wright (who played his niece in Shadow of a Doubt).  They have an adorable moppet of a daughter.  All is post-war happiness.  Or is it?

Cotten begins realizing how easy it would be for him to rob his own bank.  There's no femme fatale pushing him to do it - he just realizes he's clever enough to pull it off, and people trust him enough that he won't be found out til he's already out of the country.  It's basically asking the question of "why am I playing by the rules if the rules aren't doing me much good to really get ahead?"

And, so he waits til no one is looking at the end of a Friday and clears out the vault.

What follows shows up in movies like Quick Change where the heist just will not play by your carefully sorted rules.  So for about an hour we're watching every conceivable foul-up get in his way as he has to gaslight his wife (who he is taking with him, telling her he's on a business trip) to get them both on a plane.  In a way, it's almost painful as the issues mount up.

By nature, I'm a planner.  Jamie is well aware, my least favorite thing is a surprise, maybe even a good one, if it's going to throw off my schedule.  I am *much* better about this now than I was ten years ago, where I'd just lose my shit if things got off schedule.  So in a way, this movie seems designed to make me crazy.

We were warned by Eddie Muller in the intro that the writer/ directors of this movie are famous for having some bizarre and far-fetched set-ups, and this is certainly one of them.  There's no ticking clock at the outset of the movie - our hero just decides he needs to rob this bank NOW instead of just planning it out and re-working the plan until he's got a clean getaway planned.  

Ie: for a movie all about planning the perfect heist, what actually occurs is nothing of the sort.  And we get to watch Cotten spiral into being a real jerk as the walls he created close in.

Anyway, it wasn't my favorite movie.  But it did have a unique ending - that ends just before I'm pretty sure the whole thing would have blown up in his face, anyway, so - as they say - you get a happy ending depending on when you leave the story.

Chabert Horror Watch! Scarecrow (2013)

Chabert completes negotiations for her Hallmark contract

Watched:  04/19/2025

Format:  Tubi

Viewing:  First

Director:  Sheldon Wilson

A movie with a pretty good idea behind it, this movie has an okay first half hour or so and then throws away all of that goodwill in the bin by becoming a movie where things keep happening, but nothing really resolves itself.  And I can't tell if that's intentional - like a joke on the part of the writers - or laziness or sheer incompetence.

It's not even clear, based on what we saw before, that ten seconds after the credits role, that our Final Girl isn't going to get killed.

What's most weird is that the description of the film on IMDB - from the producers, I'd guess - is not what actually happens in the movie.  There's elements of that, but that's not really what happens.  I almost feel like this was a description of the script at some point but then they made a different movie through rewrites.  

A group of high schoolers is going to spend their day of Saturday Detention (ala The Breakfast Club) on a farm "disassembling" the famed scarecrow from the old Miller farm that's part of the town's annual Scarecrow Festival.  But the movie opens on two horny teens sneaking onto the farm first, planning to spook their pals when they arrive, and getting killed by our monster.  

The town has an annual Scarecrow Festival during which they have some game where they ritualistically "bury" the Scarecrow.  But it's essentially a small-town fall fest, I guess.  We never see it.

Chabert 90's Watch! Lost in Space (1998)

Watched:  04/16/2025
Format:  Prime

Viewing:  Third

Director:  Stephen Hopkins

As Lost In Space (1998) concludes and 1990's-style "electronica" kicks in, complete with dialog samples from the film, you can find yourself missing your glow sticks and rave-ready mini-back-pack.  And you will also hear Lacey Chabert declare "this mission sucks".  

It does, Lacey.  It really, really does. 

It's maybe not a great sign for a movie that when the heroes are all killed in a fiery explosion in what becomes a divergent timeline, we cheered.

Back in March of 1998, I was at FAO Schwarz in Manhattan, and there was a huge, pre-release push for Lost in Space (1998) which was coming in just two or three weeks.   They had a life-size robot and toys with the display type I thought Star Wars would get (I underestimated).  I found this guy's web-page about the 1998 display that he wrote in 2006.  That robot kinda convinced me:  this movie will rule!

Anyway, the trailers were fine.  And after seeing the toys and the robot, I bought into the look, the chance to refresh an older property - that I had never actually seen.  The casting, which included William Hurt, Gary Oldman, Mimi Rogers, and Heather Graham, was insane. Matt LeBlanc of Friends fame also starred, and that was fine.  The movie also, of course, starred a teenage Lacey Chabert, which hit me in no particular way in '98 as I'd never seen Party of Five.   

It's been 27 years since I've seen the 1998 movie of Lost In Space - which I last saw on April 11th, 1998*.  But I have now completed the trilogy of Chabert vehicles that had the word "Lost" in the title (see also The Lost and The Lost Tree).  And, curiously, each film represents a different sort of bad.  A Lower-budget, silly and derivative studio pic with The Lost, a microbudget flick trying and failing to do supernatural thrills with with The Lost Tree, and - as Stuart put it - bloated 1990's studio excess, with Lost in Space.  

Classic Watch: The Godfather Part II (1974)

Watched:  04/13/2025

Format:  4K disc that failed, and then streaming

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Francis Ford Coppola

Well.  What do you even really say about The Godfather Part II (1974)?  I mean, really.  If you're looking for insight into this movie, is The Signal Watch really going to crack the case on this one?

As we'd done with Godfather, we broke Part II into two nights of viewing.  Jamie hadn't actually seen this one (I have no idea how that happened, and neither did she), and it was a delight seeing her wrapped up in the movie.  She can weigh in down in the comments with her reaction, but it was very positive.  

We had plenty to say about the impact The Godfather had on us back when we were a youth watching movies aimed at adults circa 1990.  In an era when the common wisdom was that the sequel was always worse and a money grab, watching the then-16 year old The Godfather Part II was a revelation of what was possible when you have the ground work of a classic.  Honestly, one of my reactions watching the movie is anger that it doesn't seem like many filmmakers have even tried to take apart these two movies and see what makes them work and try to one up them.

Chabert Watch! The Lost Tree (2016)

Watched:  04/13/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Brian A. Metcalf

Woof.

The Lost Tree (2016)?  More like "lost me 30 seconds in".  Amirite?  Where are my Lost Tree bros?

To me, the thing that is most interesting about this very not-good movie is less the movie than digging in a bit to how Hollywood works/ worked.  It's famously a town of hustlers, and for a brief while in the late 90's and through the 00's, thanks to the power of indie film, some of that got celebrated as we had breakout films like Swingers.  But since Ed Wood got his hands on a fog machine, genre has also been a part of indie film made for no money, but hoping an idea and a performance will carry the day.

That does not happen here.

This movie is a mess from the start.  The camera-work is maybe not the best, and shot on consumer video as near as I can tell.  The audio in mostly fine, I guess, but the soundtrack/ score is doing some Olympic-class lifting, desperately trying to convince the viewer something is happening, and we're not just watching a dude wander around by himself in an empty cabin or an open field for insanely long stretches.

I will be honest and say:  I watched this movie and I can describe what happens in it, but if there's a story here with a point or an ironic twist, I am at a loss.  

Horror Watch: The Body Snatcher (1945)

Watched:  04/12/2025

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Robert Wise

So.  I love Universal Horror.  This is where we get Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, et al.  But, gosh darn it - those RKO horror films are good.  I was basking in how well done I found The Body Snatcher (1945) when I realized it was directed by Robert Wise, who I consider one of the best directors ever produced in the US, but who doesn't ever seem to get named among the greats.  But this is my blog, and here - Robert Wise reigns supreme.*

RKO's horror flicks are more "creepy tales" than relying on monsters and Jack Pierce make-up.   There's nothing supernatural here, no super science bringing beings to life.  It's more about the darkness in people, and that's where I think this movie works astoundingly well.

Anyway - I also learned some interesting history!  So, for twenty years or so, I've been aware that back in the day, it was hard to come by cadavers for medical schools, and so they'd, uhm....  pay dudes to steal bodies.  If you were near a medical school, there was an absolute chance that you were going to be dug up and dissected.  What I found out thanks to this movie is that ground zero for this practice getting particularly grim was in Edinburgh, Scotland.  Look up the Burke and Hare murders.  This shit is wild, yo.

But it turns out that if your business is selling bodies for fun and profit, it's easy to turn living people into bodies.

Anyhoo...  our movie finds a promising young medical student about to drop out of school as he can't afford it anymore  At the same time, a(n attractive) woman and her daughter come to see the school's headmaster to see if he'll perform surgery to help the daughter walk again.  The cab that is taking them there is driven by our man, Boris Karloff, who also happens to go dig up corpses by night and sell them to the school's headmaster.

What spins out is not a monster movie, but more the horror of the young doctor-to-be realizing what is going on, and his own complicity in the practice, while Boris Karloff and the head doctor reveal how they've been entwined for decades in this foul business of grave robbing, and what sort of man is happy to make money doing it, and why doctors are desperate for it.

The movie also co-stars Bela Lugosi as a servant who wants to get cut in on the body business.  

There are some truly great scenes and ideas in this movie - some from the source material, a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson, and others made up for the film.  It's wonderfully shot by Robert De Grasse - and one of those things RKO always seemed to know to invest in to make their movies look phenomenal.  RKO was no poverty row studio, but they knew where to spend money (until Hughes took over).

All of the stuff with the singing girl is great horror movie work.  Hats off to Wise.

Karloff and Lugosi are rock solid in the movie, but I also really liked Edith Atwater as Meg - the head doctor's maid and mistress.  A complicated role that has to emote and thread the story together, she nails it.  She looked super familiar and I figured out that 24 years later, she was the inn-keeper in True Grit.  

Anyway - I really don't care to spoil the movie, just add it to the list.  There's also some more Val Lewton produced movies from this era I need to get into. Karloff followed these with Isle of the Dead and Bedlam, both of which are held in high esteem, but I've not yet seen.

*Dude never made a bad movie.  Maybe instead of watching every Chabert movie, I could have made a point by watching every Wise movie, but here we are.

Chabert Watch! The Lost (2009)

Watched:  04/11/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Bryan Goeres

Here's my theory:  the writers came up with the ending for The Lost (2009), and then had to work backward from there.  Desperate to keep anyone from guessing the ending, they kinda screwed up what you need to do with a mystery, which is leave clues that make you realize "oh, yeah, it was kinda there all along!"  But, nope.  They hid it so well, and the twist is so out of left field, you're just sort of left shrugging.

Not that anyone was invested in the prior 85 or so minutes of the movie before the twist ending.  

This is an oddly misogynistic supernatural thriller/ psychological mystery wherein Lacey Chabert plays a young woman in a Spanish insane asylum.  Three years prior, she seems to have set a mansion on fire as well as someone inside.  As a student, she was living in the guest house.  She looks pale and spooky as she watches it all burn, and maybe has psychic powers.

The movie is kind of badly shot.  The audio is poorly mixed, and not helped by Assante mumbling his way through the dialog so badly we turned on subtitles.  Also, a good portion of the cast is Spanish and not hitting every line in a way you can hear.  So when Dina Meyer shows up enunciating, it's a trip.  

Armand Assante, who I've only ever seen in Judge Dredd, plays a psychiatrist who examined Chabert briefly 3 years ago before saying "she's nuts" and leaving her in the Spanish psych ward.  Why she did not come back stateside, I am unsure.  Chabert's sister is Dina Meyer, who basically blackmails Assante into going to take a look at Chabert again.

Noir Watch: The Narrow Margin (1952)

Watched:  04/06/2025

Format:  TCM Noir Alley

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Richard Fleischer/ William Cameron Menzies

I've only mentioned this movie twice on the blog from what I can tell.  Once in 2010, and once in 2018.  That seems nuts, because I'm sure this was more like the 5th or 6th time I'd seen The Narrow Margin (1952).  

Personally, I love this movie.  I'm shocked I didn't get to it during the podcast.  I think SimonUK and I talked about double-billing it with the Gene Hackman-starring remake, which I still haven't seen.

The movie is pretty straightforward.  It's an RKO flick, so it's a bit more rough and tumble, a bit sexier and sassier, and the sense of danger a bit higher.  There's a whole backstory to the movie that stars Howard Hughes being out of his mind and thinking Jane Russell should really be in everything and also not getting how his own movies work.  You can look it up.  Today is not the day I make this a film history blog.

Chabert Watch! The Color of Rain (2014)

Watched:  04/05/2025

Viewing:  First

Format:  Hallmark

Director:  Anne Wheeler

Job:  Church school admin

new skill:  widow

Man: Warren Christie

Job of Man:  I don't know if I ever figured that out

Goes to/ Returns to:  Stays in place

Event:  Christmas pageant

Food:  Italian, also, what other people bring by

So, I'm rapidly running out of Chabert Hallmark movies that are not holiday-themed, and I'm not sure I'll be diving into Christmas movies any time soon.

I don't know what was going on at Hallmark in 2014, or if this was a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie or what.  The Hall of Fame movies tend to be a little closer to regular-ol-movies as they originally aired on network TV, often on Sundays, but this was likely always on the cable channel.  The Color of Rain (2014) is based on the real life of two families who each was dealt a blow by cancer, each side losing a spouse, and then the two remaining spouses meeting and falling for each other.  And the resulting side-eye they get from their support structures.

I guess I'm basically shocked that this movie made its way to Hallmark, because it's sort of the opposite of the usually marshmallow fluff comfort treat that the network is known for.  Instead, it strives to show how people going through a spousal death and in the throes of grieving really are feeling and dealing with day-to-day life - and it's not a rose-colored version.  As both families have kids, they require daily care as well as the emotional support needed when you lose a parent - and that can include the kids just flipping out.  Man in this movie is angry with God, and this is a movie about good, church-going folks with the pastor as a supporting character and the center of their lives seemingly the church and its attached school.

Chabert's character had three years of knowing her husband was sick and had already taken on everything, but Man's character loses his wife abruptly to cancer, and is utterly unprepared.  The connection comes as Chabert is kind of the only one making sense to him in the wake of his wife's passing.

Angry Animal/ Kilmer Watch: The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)

Watched:  04/02/2026

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Stephen Hopkins

Somewhere in The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), a movie that tells the curious tale of two rogue lions hunting and killing over 100 people that were part of an effort to build a bridge for a train in a remote area of Kenya, is a better movie.  My memories of this film were that Val Kilmer is great, Michael Douglas is not, and the one scene at the end totally had me.

A second viewing, almost 30 years later, and a glance at Wikipedia puts some weight on my suspicions - that Executive Producer Michael Douglas decided that if this was his movie, he would be prominently featured, and the movie would flail around on screen.  If there was a story to tell, it would become hopelessly muddied by the film's end.  

Chabert Watch! Non-Stop (2013)

Watched:  04/03/2025

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Richard Gabai

Is this movie an absurdist comedy?  Or a straight-up Lifetime thriller that had two drafts written and then they shot it?  I honestly, earnestly do not know.

Non-Stop (2013) is a 90 minute movie that starts getting to the action in minute 41 or so, dragging out a both boring and overly elaborate set-up that includes exposition dropped during the credits - because no one thought to include this information in the rest of the film.  This is Lacey Chabert doing her absolute best against a movie that makes no sense and every actor seems to think they're in a different movie.  Meanwhile, Chabert is trying to convey something that the writing doesn't help her with at all.

I am not averse to the locked-room-mystery-aboard-transportation.  Give me a murder on a boat, a lady vanishing from a train, snakes on a plane.  But this is not a murder mystery for Lacey to sleuth out.  This is a movie that doesn't understand how these movies work, provides far too few potential suspects and a single motivation, and muffs the ending.  It realizes it has plot holes at the 2/3rds point and goes back and tries to paper them over with gigantic neon signs along the way, so you know what's up every time a plot point is introduced and where we're headed.