Thy Neighbor's Wife (2001)

That was an excellent one.

Pretty Good

Good concept, poorly executed.

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

What we have here is a dumbed down, (seemingly) made for TV, version of the nineties thriller 'The Hand That Rocks the Cradle'. The main reason I saw this, aside from the fact I seem to have something of a penchant for stupid and rather dull thrillers, is the fact that it stars Kari Wuhrer. Her name might not mean a lot to a lot of people, but she's about the closest thing we've got a B-movie queen nowadays (although she really does need to get a better agent!). As mentioned, the plot pretty much rips off The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, although this time there is a different reason for revenge and the unfortunate woman at the centre has a different affliction. Wuhrer plays a woman upset after her husband killed himself due to his work colleagues. She takes it upon herself to get revenge, killing a couple of them, before posing as a maid for another. She worms her way into the family through each of the different members, all the while plotting her sweet revenge.The thing that makes this film fun is the fact that it's completely ridiculous! The acting is terrible, and there are several sequences that are just far too convenient and/or don't make any sense at all! The film is directed by Jim Wynorski, who made Chopping Mall in 1986 before going to make a load of made for video crap, like this film. Some of the soft porn from his other films has made it into this one, and while we don't get to see much; there are plenty of breasts on display to keep things interesting. Kari Wuhrer gives by far the best performance and single handily makes the movie worth watching. She's always nice to look at, which cant really be said for the overall experience of watching this movie; but it is nice to see Re-Animator's Barbara Crampton on screen again. The plot is fairly standard stuff and although there is some attempt to build the characters, it is all a bit hard to care about. It doesn't take a genius to work out what will happen in the end, but there's plenty of laughs (for wrong reasons, mostly) on the way and while this is pretty crap, it's nice, gentle viewing and I did rather enjoy wasting time on it.

This movie is truly bad and I can safely say that it is one of the worst films I have watched this year! This film plays more like a bad soap than a thriller. The plot is badly thought out, the dialog is stilted and the acting is wooden at best. Kari Wurher was the only good thing about this movie and even she struggled to give it any life. It includes several gratuitous sex scenes which consist mainly of closeups of silicon enlarged breasts and which have very little to do with the plot. This may of course appeal to a number of people into porn flicks but to most of us it is just down right annoying. Maybe the writers got confused and thought they were still writing a soft-core porn title? Give this one a miss, it is not worth it!

This movie is a direct rip-off of "Scorned", which in turn was itself a direct rip-off of "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle"; they even hired an Andrew Stevens lookalike to play the husband. To give you an idea of its quality, I will elaborate on the "bloodless" murder a previous reviewer talked about, and tell you that it must also be the first stabbing in the history of cinema that is executed without a knife! Yes, I swear, play the scene frame-by-frame and you'll see that when Wuhrer is supposed to be stabbing the housemaid to death, she isn't actually holding anything! Maybe that explains the lack of blood. But that's not all; the dialogue that's used to show us how the family is in a constant state of crisis is forced, awkward and delivered at the most inappropriate moments. The script is totally by-the-numbers, with every plot point telegraphed in advance (the "evil woman" seduces the father and the son, makes friends with the daughter, causes health problems for the mother, etc.). Despite all that, the film IS ultimately worth seeing, for one reason alone: Kari Wuhrer. With her pretty face, voluptuous and supple figure, and insinuating voice, she manages the no-small-feat of being just as sexy when she is dressed as when she is naked. She certainly blows Shannon Tweed out of the water in any case. (*1/2)

The box looked vaguely enticing. A revenge thriller. Well, it wasn't. It was a sorry collection of scenes cobbled together in a fashion that paid, no more than, lip service to the concept of a story line. The only thing that kept my attention was the realization (which came about 20 minutes in) that every female character in the film was going to get her kit off at some stage. Unfortunately, whilst this does happen, these scenes are interspersed between far too much "drama". Having said that, I still think this video would be far more appropriately placed behind the beaded curtain (at the local video store) than out with the serious movies.