Amnesia (1997)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Best movie of this year hands down!

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

**SPOILERS** Turning all the women in town, which has barely 100 residents, on with his saintly and pure of heart sermons and, in the privacy of an out of town motel, his hot and lustful sex Pastor Paul Keller, Nicholas Walker, is just about worn out when it comes to pay any attention, sexual or outer-wise, to his mousy and frustrated wife Martha, Ally Sheely. Being stuck with not only Martha but her son, Pauls step-son, Edger(Vincent Berry) who just can't cut it in his school work is about all the outside pressures that the good pastor can take.One of the many women in town whom the righteous Pastor Paul has his eye on happens to be Edger's sexy teacher Veronica Dow, Dara Tomanovich, whom he's been having a very raunchy affair with at the out of town motel. The motel is run by the love-sick, for Paul of course, Charlence Hunt (Sally Kirkland) who's been secretly listening into Paul and Veronica's love-making secessions and getting herself all hyped up over them. Paul , since he was a little boy, has had this phobia about water. This all stems from when Paul was a little boy and saw his best friend Frankie Serig drown in the local watering hole with him being unable to save his life. It turns out that for some strange reason Paul uses the name Frank Serig when he registers into the motel with Veronica.Insuring himself for a cool million Paul then plans to get himself permanently lost, by faking his own death, and then have him and Veronica take off with the cash and live, in sin, happily every after. Checking out the local river Paul then plans to find a way he can make it look like he drown without his body being found but freaks out when he, while on a rowboat fishing, sees a vision of young Frankie drowning in it. Cracking his skull, by falling down and landing on his head, Paul falls overboard almost drowning himself.Finding his way back to Charlence's motel Paul also finds that he doesn't know who he is which to the hot as a pistol, for handsome and sexy Paul's love and affection, is heaven sent for the love starved Charlence. Charlence takes all the advantage that she can of the confused and bewildered Paul by making him her both private and personal slave boy. It's after Paul's funeral that Martha is contacted by agent Tim Bishop, John Savage, of Luckland insurance the company that insured Paul for a million smackers and things really begin to get wild. Bishop not at all believing that Paul is deceased but at the same time not realizing that it's Veronica Paul's secret lover, not Martha who knows nothing about Paul's policy, that was supposed to be the soul beneficiary. While all this is happening Paul is being held captive by the insane with love Charlence at her motel with no idea what all this fuss about him is all about!The film gets a bit convoluted when Bishop gets himself good and drunk and them showing up at Martha's house makes a complete jerk of himself trying to drunkly and sexually attack her where he only ends up out cold on her bed with his pants off. Bishop's bizarre behavior has Veronica, who knows that Paul is indeed alive, get Martha to blackmail him into paying her, and with the fact that she came up with this great idea, and Veronica the insurance money. The big stumbling block in the entire Paul business is that he's alive and that Charlence also knows that he's alive and with her insane actions threatening to expose that fact, to Bishop, and being stuck on Paul that she won't let go of her dreamboat even if it kills her or him.You can't help feeling sorry for Paul in all this since no matter what bad things he did in his past, and it was a lot, he wasn't exactly himself or anyone else, at the time of his demise. Being the nameless and mindless entity that he became when the ax came down on his head, in the form of an off-the-wall Charlence who together with Veronica and Martha, made it difficult to accept that Paul paid for his sins since he had no idea at all that he ever made them.

This film has some seriously wasted talent, like the previous commenter said. The film would have been more decent had it had a better budget and storyline. It was a typical hallmark-style take on a murder mystery which wasn't a murder mystery, it was evident what would eventually happen .. predictable and the ending was rather callous, in that it was kind of demented. My favourite thing about the whole movie was the music at the beginning and end which i thought sounded extremely Australian outback-like, but also added some enigmatic atmosphere to the themes highlighted in the film itself, if that makes any sense.I got this film for $1 at Wal Mart and being from England and hoping to study film studies at Uni, I thought what better opportunity to study film than to buy a load of cheap digiview DVDs. I wasn't expecting amazing story lines and directing/acting, but this one was admittedly better than "Second Chance", which doesn't really do much justice to the cast and director at all. So here's my 5/10 rating for being ordinary yet reasonable.Mel x

This movie was better than I'd expected, full of black humor and had pretty good acting. Sally Kirkland was very convincing as the lonely and obsessed hotel owner. Poor Ally Sheedy has resulted to playing in these low budget films, although she is a very talented actress. Anyways, the movie was pretty good, but I really thought the ending was pretty awful, with lots of loose ends. There is no way that Ally's character and the adulteress, Edgar's teacher, could have got away clean with that insurance money. I mean really, they didn't even discuss what to do with the additional bodies and how they were going to cover it all up! Plus, when they dumped her husband's body in the lake, he was still bagged. If the police were to find his body, they would have known it was a homicide! I just thought the ending was quite a disappointment, with all the loose endings that weren't resolved. If those were wrapped up, I think this movie would have been a little more convincing.

I liked the movie a real lot. Wanted to see it just for Dara Tomanovich, but the plot and story were ok too. A very cool change in plot when you least expect it.