Unintentional comedy, glam trash, sleazy thriller. Those labels describe this ridiculous Sharon Stone Z grade melodrama to a tee. It starts off as your typical woman in peril film and just gets more progressively weird until the laughs start, and they never stop. It's good that I could view it from that perspective because otherwise, I would be unable to get through this. Stone works as a non-call stenographer, sitting at home when she's not working and fixing broken dolls, seen in the first moments of the film buying yet again her umpteenth pair of extremely sharp scissors which she'll need when she's attack in the elevator of her building, managing to pull them out by the handles and stabbing an attempted rapist in the arm.
Along comes Steve Railsback who takes her to his apartment where she meets his creepy wheelchair bound lookalike brother, reports her crime to the police and the landlord, and is escorted back to her apartment by the "good" brother. It seems like every time she turns around, stone is attacked by someone or sees whom she believes to be the attacker, and when she finally ends up in a bizarre townhouse for a job ends up being locked in for a creepy encounter with no working phone and a ton of bizarre dolls that seem to come to life as well as the corpse of her attacker.
Back in the 80's, Stone wasn't viewed well as an actress, just one of many glamour girls utilized more for her looks and ability to scream well or scheme convincingly, and then basic stink came along. If this had been a prequel to her role of Catherine Tranell, maybe you'd get the idea why her character (a virgin here in constant need of therapy) turned to playing sex games with ice picks. Her performance here is nothing that no other actress with the ability to scream and become hysterical could do, so she's just doing as the script demands.
She's faced with the worst kind of unbelievable, laughable melodrama so rather than root for her, the audience is too busy laughing. Vicki Frederick ("A Chorus Line") has a horribly undefined part as a scheming female wanting to keep her and the walking Railsback apart, with Ronny Cox as her therapist who describes her lack of sex drive in pornographic detail, and Michelle Phillips as his politician wife. Just when you think that this film can't top itself in audacity, it does, and the situation she finds herself in while locked up seems like something you'd see a silent movie heroine dealing with in 1921, not a modern woman of 1991. In my case of viewing this as it just got out of control, the laughs eventually began to have me shedding tears as well as getting pains in my ribs. Not many films have that impact on me.
Along comes Steve Railsback who takes her to his apartment where she meets his creepy wheelchair bound lookalike brother, reports her crime to the police and the landlord, and is escorted back to her apartment by the "good" brother. It seems like every time she turns around, stone is attacked by someone or sees whom she believes to be the attacker, and when she finally ends up in a bizarre townhouse for a job ends up being locked in for a creepy encounter with no working phone and a ton of bizarre dolls that seem to come to life as well as the corpse of her attacker.
Back in the 80's, Stone wasn't viewed well as an actress, just one of many glamour girls utilized more for her looks and ability to scream well or scheme convincingly, and then basic stink came along. If this had been a prequel to her role of Catherine Tranell, maybe you'd get the idea why her character (a virgin here in constant need of therapy) turned to playing sex games with ice picks. Her performance here is nothing that no other actress with the ability to scream and become hysterical could do, so she's just doing as the script demands.
She's faced with the worst kind of unbelievable, laughable melodrama so rather than root for her, the audience is too busy laughing. Vicki Frederick ("A Chorus Line") has a horribly undefined part as a scheming female wanting to keep her and the walking Railsback apart, with Ronny Cox as her therapist who describes her lack of sex drive in pornographic detail, and Michelle Phillips as his politician wife. Just when you think that this film can't top itself in audacity, it does, and the situation she finds herself in while locked up seems like something you'd see a silent movie heroine dealing with in 1921, not a modern woman of 1991. In my case of viewing this as it just got out of control, the laughs eventually began to have me shedding tears as well as getting pains in my ribs. Not many films have that impact on me.