Joseph Pedulla

The premise, to begin with, is far fetched: a forced admission to an old-age home without a psychiatric pre-screening is about as realistic as a Major League Baseball team allowing some guy pitch for them without a tryout. Absolutely impossible. I never saw a movie in which the realities of gender struggle so dominated the plot. Marla did not need to be lesbian or to have a lesbian lover, but this was a way to express maximum scorn for heterosexual procreation, so it was used as a political, not aesthetic, element. The title of the movie might as well have been “Who Needs Men?” I never saw a movie in which plot was so structured as to fit a feminist agenda. Everything was misrepresented to suit with it: the mafia attempting to kill Marla in an extraordinarily complicated fashion instead of two taps to the back of the head, for one. A woman unafraid of the mob, especially after learning they have murdered the doctor who allowed the main mobster’s mother to be sent to the old-age home to begin with. Afraid of being murdered? No HER! She’s a STRONG WOMAN! No fear for her! Hogwash! In the real world she would have let the mobster’s mother out in negative time, because the mob is not impressed by strong women—or men!! But we have to do mental gymnastics so that the female protagonist can sell her “strong woman” agenda. This, by the way, was the reason behind using a dwarf to play the mob boss. His diminutive size gave the impression that he was not a force to be reckoned with. One thing about the film WAS very pleasing, though: seeing Marla shot dead by a man she had walked all over at the start of the film. THAT scene warmed my heart!

The movie fails because it presents antagonistic forces that proceed from different sources, and, for this reason, confuses the viewer. It would be like a movie in which blonde women were being killed by a serial killer-AND lightning strikes. Can't you just feel the air coming out of the balloon? The movie presents a micro-organistic foe but, at the same time, another foe, a god figure the appears as a deer standing on hind legs. All of this appears to proceed from the characters' discovery of an ancient ruin that they have partially uncovered in a typical archaeological dig. Some of the characters appear to die from this microorganism, but some appear to be seduced to their end by the god/deer. Which foe are we to fear and follow? It almost seems as though, part-way through the script, the writer found a single antagonist too simple or unsupportable and felt the need to come up with another, a sidekick of sorts. It does not work. The effect, as I suggested earlier, is a diffusion of focus, resulting in the viewer's caring less and less about EACH foe, as weird as that sounds. If you let the helium out of the balloon, it sinks to the ground, and no one will want to watch it.