Jennifer Eight (1992)

the audience applauded

Redundant and unnecessary.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

At times, this movie is mesmerizing and mysterious, a really good story about a serial killer who targets blind women. But at other times it is unbearably stupid and overdone. Andy Garcia is OK part of the time and terrible when he portrays any strong emotion, like anger. He and Uma Thurman are good together at times, like when she is freaked out over the party and Andy comforts her. This is a "B" movie but it aspires to be an "A" flick. John Malkovich is wonderful, at times, as he often is, when given almost nothing to work with. Lots of the time the story just feel empty. Gets worse as it goes on.

As soon as I began to watch this film on Netflix I could not focus on it, I found myself doing other things and seemed to not be drawn into the film. I got about half way through the film before I realised I did not really know what the film was even about, expect that fact that it involved a blind Uma Thurman and a stiff Andy Garcier in which they are supposedly meant to like each other, although I do not see a very effective connection between the two actors. I feel the actors within the film are B-list featuring Andy Garcier, Uma Thurman, Kathy Baker and John Malkovich.I just felt as though the film was very slow and not very intense at all, with a mellow romance meant to be budding between the two main characters of the detective and the witness. Although, I did not find the film very predictable and even though it was not very tense I still attempted to work out who was the killer, so they did create some motivated for me.

The prime character in 'Jennifer Eight' is blind but everyone in the film might as well be blind, deaf and mute to be able to miss the obvious indications that lead right to the killer from the moment that individual is on screen. Everyone seems to look the other way to avoid the person who turns out to be the killer maybe because the movie still has an hour or so to pad out, the time that it becomes crystal clear to the audience who that person is.The movie stars Andy Garcia as a cop with a movie cop name – John Berlin. He goes to investigate a murder, which leads to him digging through the trash to find body parts. He finds a woman's severed hand and after an analysis turns up that the woman was blind because the fingertips have worn down from reading Braille and that the hand spent some time in a freezer.He is soon on the trail of a killer who stalks blind women because several blind women have been killed in the area with that same M.O. Garcia interviews Helena (Uma Thurman), the woman's roomy who is herself blind. She and the cop fall in love not because of a mutual attraction rather because they are a man and a woman thrown together in a movie in which her life will eventually be in danger and he will have to save the woman he loves.Thurman is usually the luminous element to any movie but here her character is so pitiful that she doesn't need protection so much as she just needs a big old hug. The movie might want you to have sympathy for her but it doesn't back out when opportunity arises to have her slip nude into a bathtub while the killer skulks around her apartment.'Jennifer Eight' almost counts down the minutes to the next inevitable move. The movie is set up in a series of unbelievably predictable vignette so familiar to this genre. The movie is one part thriller, one part love story, one part police procedural written by people who obviously believe that you can't have one without the other.

In "Jennifer 8" Andy Garcia plays an L.A. detective who goes to a small town to find a women's killer who seemed to return after two years without making new victims. This new investigation will lead to more conclusive clues on discovering that this murderer always female targets who happen to be blind and the only one who can help the police is an blind teacher (Uma Thurman) that might be the next victim.Moving with great thrills and some twists and turns, the film is incredibly good in its drama, in its effective suspense, only losing some credibility towards its conclusion of unbelievable situations and some deranged slowness when it comes to show the questioning of Garcia's character as the main suspect of his partner's murder while solving the case. However, the main problem was that writer and director Bruce Robinson seemed more concerned about making a great opening and a great middle but stumbled with some annoying mistakes towards the conclusive moments that might ruin the experience for the viewer. Example: when the detective is considered suspect of the crimes, he's interrogated, arrested for a brief period, the his bosses decide to release him so he can prove his innocence (?). Then, he's arrested again, after a strange sequence of cuts that don't make any sense after he meets the killer that smacks him down, and all of sudden comes the news that the detective was the criminal, case closed. And on a strange whirlwind of events, he gets the chance of being released (again!) on bail (? #2). It's really unbelievable."Jennifer 8" manages to do some good on us viewers thanks to the great cast involved that besides Garcia and Thurman also has John Malkovich, Kathy Baker, Lance Henriksen (very good here), Graham Beckel, Lenny Van Dohlen, Bob Gunton and Kevin Conway. As for the plot, it was quite a news when of its release, now it's so overdone in films like "Blink" (1994) that it might not impress most audiences. The great thing, really, is to know the killer commits such crimes and not really knowing who he is (if you look carefully you'll get who's the person right away after the first clue given by the teacher). Lots of thrills await you on the horizon even though it's quite a forgettable film and just like its title it gets an 8 with me. 8/10