Held for Ransom (2000)

Powerful

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Beautiful, moving film.

The acting in this movie is really good.

"Easy Rider" it of course isn't. It's not big cinema at all, just a low-budget TV film, which shows us an old Dennis Hopper, 45 years after his debut in Rebel Without A Cause. And in my opinion, not awful either (nor was I offended by realistic language).They didn't do chases, but I liked to see those propeller boats in the Everglades (also the dog race - things that aren't so often shown in movies). They did hardly do any action, it was mostly talk, but sometimes that is quite welcome to me - for a late-night mildly thrilling film. The psychology of kidnappers, victims, parents, and the internal conflicts in these groups were illustrated, more or less convincingly. Police didn't really achieve something, the kids basically took care of themselves. Witness the final voice-over.This film was sold in January 2009 with the German SFT magazine, together with "Finder's Fee". At 3.90 euro, I didn't think of it as a bad investment (and haven't seen the other film yet :^)

Wow... nine comments thus far, and four of them are positive. (Well, maybe three... it's hard to tell if that "4/5" rating is supposed to be read as "four out of five" or "four-fifths of a point", presumably on a scale of 1 to 7319.) Consider this my attempt at tipping the balance back a bit closer to where it should be, namely in the "If you value your sanity or self-respect, for gawd's sake stay away from this load of crap!" category.If I had to say something positive about the movie, though, I would point out that my roommate and I had a perfectly good time trying to remember what those bayou-trash boats that look like they have lettuce centrifuges nailed on sideways behind the driver's seat are called, and that we enjoyed hurling abuse and obscenities at the screen throughout the movie. Oh, and it also ended before the tape ran out.Bad things: not only does the teen starlet who has to strip down to her underwear not get mauled by baboons or fed to the Sarlacc, but you're also forced to spend the better part of an hour pretending that you are going to be surprised when the unscrupulous parental unit with the failing business turns out to be the guy responsible for the brilliant kidnapping plot that involved traveling into the swamp to find some toothless crazies who will kill a couple of people in order to net himself a tidy ransom. Also, I don't believe that any of the cast or crew were injured by flying circular-saw blades during the making of this movie, and that's an injustice of cosmic proportions.

I actually enjoyed this old-school suspense thriller. Better than most, not as good as some -- but all in all a good rental when HBO, "Skinemax" and Showtime are running re-runs! Dennis Hopper is his normal, crazy self and many 70's stars appear.

I only rented this movie to see Morgan Fairchild and Joan Van Ark, who turn out to each have about three lines of dialogue in the movie as the kidnapped teens' moms. I don't understand why these well-known women were hired only to be given three lines... Anyway, this is one of the most boring, stupid movies I've seen in a long time. It was absolutely awful. It's confusing because Dennis Hopper and Debi Mazar, who are in lots of other things, are in this trash. Why would they bother with doing such a low-budget movie?