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UNSPEAKABLE (2002)
Act, write, but don't do both on the first try! The aptly-titled vanity project of producer/writer/star Pavan Grover was released in 2002 and then, for some reason, got a new DVD release last year with a new cover and a few weeks of ads on Dark Horizons. Were it not for that, it may well have escaped my notice forever. If only. Grover plays Jesse Mowatt, an imprisoned serial killer so evil that several religions call him the Antichrist. He piques the interest of scientist Dina Meyer, who has an infallible truth-detecting machine which plays back memories (from an omniscient third-person perspective!). The Warden (Dennis Hopper, awful Southern accent) and The Governor (Jeff Fahey) both write it off as hippie liberal bullshit, and who can blame them when after one meeting she declares Mowatt to have "psychic ability, telepathy, almost superhuman control over his own physiology"? So the machine doesn't save the poor Mexican on whom the movie spends its entire first half hour dooming to execution. She then wants to use it on Mowatt. Unspeakable features a lot of standard prison-movie ingredients (Bible-thumping asshole warden, legions of corrupt and cruel guards, drawn-out waits for a call on the red phone) and deviates from them mostly by having its prisoner of focus as awful as everybody says he is. There's a lot of low-level religious mumbo-jumbo that isn't very specific, and low-level sci-fi stuff that isn't very specific, and low-level psychobabble that isn't very specific. The "heady" ideas in Unspeakable don't appear to be very well thought out. Grover gives himself lots of grandiose speeches, supposedly seductive Hannibal-and-Clarice conversations with Meyer, the words "LOVE" and "HATE" tattooed across his knuckles (no kidding) and cute serial-killer groupies, while giving everybody else embarrassing lines about him being "the perfect killing machine" and how "even Jesus Christ himself would come down off the cross to juice this guy" and fearfully testifying to his impossible evil. According to the imdb, he's a doctor who loves movies so much he had to make one...and I hope he's better at that than this movie suggests he is at writing or acting. Since this was his first movie in any of these capacities, did he absolutely have to play the twisted epitome-of-evil killer? Lance Henriksen is in here as a well-intentioned public defender; why isn't he the serial killer, and Grover the do-gooder? Dennis Hopper? Even Dina Meyer, pretty kitten she may be but I'm certain she would've been a lot more interesting in the role. Directed by TV guy Thomas J. Wright (no relation), Unspeakable ends with a couple of title cards explaining the fates of the characters, even dead ones. All I wanted to see was one promising that Pavan Grover would not make any more movies. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE U's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |