“Naked Fear” (2007) is a nasty, overlong yet little work that can’t quite decide whether it is social commentary masquerading as exploitation or the other way around. A thriller directed by Thom Eberhardt and starring Danielle De Luca, it is the story a young woman kidnapped, drugged, and stripped by a man who then lets her loose in the New Mexico wilderness so he can hunt her. What Joe Magnegna is doing in a movie that aspires to direct-to-DVD quality and looks like it was filmed on a shoestring budget is yet to be determined.
I.
The film opens at dawn — after the sounds of insects and birds and rustling grass provide us with a pastoral vision — with the leisurely presentation of credits and then, pausing the presentation of text, with a middle-aged blond woman standing naked and confused in a dry grassy field surrounded by trees. Through a telescopic sight a man observes her and curses; in the open she cries for help and — perhaps after spotting the scope or the man behind it in the distance — inquires over and over of her fate or of her hunter, “Why are you doing this?” Through the scope we see her turn to run; then we cut to a wide shot with her in the distance; then to a finger on a trigger; back to the view through the scope, which is targeted on her back; and simultaneously we hear a whiz-pop, see her drop, and the scope raises to the blue sky. It lowers again to the grass, and while the background sound is of wind and grass, in the foreground it is heavy breathing and release; through the scope the camera pans, seeking but not finding the woman’s body. Back to the wide shot we cut, to golden grass and a broad green stand of trees beneath a clear sky; the woman is hunched or bent and struggles to stand, staggers a few feet, and falls; in the foreground a man holding a crossbow wanders into the scene from the left, pauses, and walks to the woman a couple hundred feet away. We cut again, with both figures in the middle field, the woman crawling left to right, the man approaching behind her; he pulls out a handgun and shoots her in the back of the head. A dramatic ‘thump’ and metallic whine accompany a cut to a pink-blue, cloudy sky, another cut to a camera panning across our landscape, and a resumption of credits, during which we observe the corpse, the man taking a bracelet from her left wrist, and another cut to him burying her.
A change of scenery follows, revealing a wall decorated by the mounted head of a horned animal; the camera zooms to its eye and pauses before cutting to a man’s hand depositing the previously acquired bracelet in the drawer of an elegant tackle box. A quick cut backs us out a few feet from the box, which the man locks and lifts as more credits roll. Another cut returns us to another head on the wall and another cut to another view of the room: we see a gun cabinet, the box now on top of it, several fish mounted on the wall, and a few framed pictures. Off-frame the man breathes, departs, and shuts the door. The lights fade, and the box is the last object to fall into darkness.
Credits continue but the tone shifts as if merging with a different movie. Various shots and cuts introduce us to the southwestern landscape, to distant low mountains, to a highway, to rusty signs and rustier trucks, to a motel and a small town, and to various characters. We meet the sheriff (Joe Mantegna), who knows everybody in this small town and who notes that around here the locals hunt most anything they want; his new deputy Dwight Terry (Arron Shiver), who has recently moved to town with his wife Karley; and Colin Mandel (J. D. Garfield), local restaurant owner and the best hunter around. Texan Diana E. (‘Elaine’) Kelper (Danielle De Luca), picked up at an airstrip by Fred (Mel MacKaron), won a ‘talent search’ at a bar one night and as a result got offered a job in Santa Paula as a dancer; the tone of her voice indicates a strained relationship with her parents. But the job looked promising; the club’s owner has a second location in Las Vegas, and perhaps she can request a transfer in a few months. Fred breaks her spirits: the other location is in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Fred is pulled over by the sheriff and Dwight, the former breaking a taillight on the car; this serves to bring several main characters together in a scene, to provide some exposition (Diana’s backstory as a 23-year-old from Texas), and to allow the sheriff to note that Santa Paula has more men than women, which, given supply and demand, might encourage some individuals (such as Fred) to ‘import’ more women. This continues in the next scene, between Dwight and Karley, as he presents her with an “Already Taken” t-shirt and also notes that the area has the highest rate of missing persons in the country.
The sheriff, Tom Benike, is on the phone with his wife, Janine, who is awa visiting her elderly mother; he opens a UPS package containing a new hunting scope and tells his wife he has to go. That evening we see the killer’s home and from it hear cries.
Diana discovers that she’s been employed at ‘Cheeks’ and her job is to be more stripper than dancer. Her family won’t lend her the money to get home. Fred insists she ‘pay back’ his expenses in getting her to town and her advance if she decides to back out. He keeps her driver’s license. She has to share a room with Rita in a cheap motel. Fred lets her know that he knows where her family lives.
Time passes. Dwight shows interest in the missing persons cases. Tom lets him know that it’s a “don’t rock the boat” kind of town. Diana becomes a popular dancer — full nudity is against the law –, but in an effort to make more money (as suggested by Fred and by Rita), begins taking off more and more. Dwight, Tom and, and Colin go hunting; Dwight and Colin fly back in the latter’s plane; then Dwight, Karley, and Colin share beers at Colin’s place, which is revealed as the killer’s home. At ‘Cheeks’ Diana has decided to turn tricks, meets Colin, gets in his vehicle, and when she attempts to leave he abducts her. From his house we hear screaming. Colin returns to his kitchen, washes a pair of bloody pliers, and fills a syringe.
He leaves the room. A clock ticks. The camera lingers.
Cut to black.
Linger.
Cut to pre-dawn, a hint of orange on the cloudy horizon. Diana awakens slowly in the grass, naked, her nose bloodied. The background music is a metallic rattle. She coughs and attempts to vomit. She wanders through the forest and grass until she encounters Colin, who explains that he’s giving her a fifteen minute head start.
From there the chase is on.
Colin always catches her and is an expert at following her tracks. She attempts to erase them; she even goes into the river to evade him, but with no success. A rattlesnake threatens, but Colin kills it so as to continue his hunt of her.
Meanwhile Fred notices Diana’s disappearance because she hasn’t shown up for work. Rita, already concerned about the disappearance of a previous roommate, investigates.
The next day Diana finds an old camp site composed of rusty cans and a dirtied shirt, which she puts on, first to keep warm, but which she then binds around her feet. The sudden silence of the birds and insects alerts her to Colin’s arrival; she flees and puts on the remainder of the shirt. She climbs a rock face and lays a trap, Colin follows, and from the summit she hurls a rock, hitting him in the head and knocking him to the ground many feet below. But instead of returning to the canyon floor — and either killing Colin, claiming his gun, or any similar options — she continues running.
She is found by a trio, two sons and a father, on a hunting or camping trip. Diana is in shock and unable to communicate.
Back in town Rita, Fred, and Dwight converse about Diana’s disappearance. After Rita and Fred depart, Dwight, intrigued, talks with the club’s bouncer, who describes Colin’s Jeep, which Dwight recognizes from its description.
Back in the wilderness the campers put Diana in a tent, the father heads back to find help, and the sons are left to keep watch. Colin has recovered and finds the camp.
Dwight discusses his suspicions with Karley, who finds excuses not to suspect Colin and to blame Diana — “some slut” — for her own circumstance. Karley is worried about Dwight losing this job as well. On his own Dwight checks out Colin’s house, but Tom arrives in time to keep him from thoroughly investigating. While Dwight suspects Colin, Tom threatens and makes excuses before departing. Rita shows up at Dwight’s house; he says that he’s off the case.
Colin shows up at the camp site, suggests to the boys that he should take custody of Diana, and when they refuse he kills them both. Diana, however, has escaped. They fight, she stabs him in the thigh and bites off part of one of his ears, and flees again. Dina, now slightly clothed, finds the father, killed by Colin, and eats an apple in his possession. Still Colin tracks her and eventually shoots her, but not fatally. She rises and continues her flight as he attempts to follow and reload his gun.
At sunset she is struck by a passing van on the highway. The driver and passenger put her in the van, and when Colin, from a distance, shoots out one of the tires, they begin to change it. Colin arrives, Diana climbs in the driver’s seat, and runs him over twice, leaving the driver and passenger behind. The van coasts to a rest in town, Diana passed out against the steering wheel. The police and paramedics arrive; Diana reacts ferally and is taken to the hospital.
Tom announces that Diana killed Colin and that the boys have been found; but Dwight takes him to Colin’s house, where Colin’s workshop, a torture room, is discovered and the ‘truth’ revealed. In the hospital Diana recovers; she gnaws through her restraints and disappears.
Ten months later we see Diana again, this time as a passenger in a Dodge pickup, not unlike her ride in the Jeep with Colin, but this time she shoots the would-be John in the head.
Diana walks away; a smile crosses her face.
The film ends.
II.
Stated bluntly, “Naked Fear” is a bad, worthless excuse for a movie that is redeemed by neither performances, script, ideas, nor directing. It over-explains its actual plot, leaving nothing to the viewer’s imagination or critical faculties, while at the same time overloading the movie with suggested avenues of development that are never pursued. Cheap production values are not the cause but merely a symptom of a slipshod affair; more money, better editing, and better casting choices would only help gloss — or spackle — over a cheap and tawdry excuse for film making. It could and would at best only become an unambitious B-movie, and the market is already saturated with those.
The cheapness of the production is most evident in the acting. Joe Mantegna and J. D. Garfield are over-qualified, but the former only has opportunities to grumble through scenes spouting exposition or threats to Arron Shiver’s Dwight, and the latter spends most of the movie hunting Diana and alternately twirling his metaphorical mustache or grimacing in pain. It’s then telling that Mantegna’s best scene might have been his solo affair with (his wife) Janine on speakerphone; he has a chance to casually inhabit a kitchen space and go about his business. Just about all of Garfield’s non-hunting appearances, however, are rather stilted and he finds himself providing exposition and plot explanation. Danielle De Luca does her best to inhabit Diana and give her semblance of character and development; there is something beguiling about her naïveté in the car with Fred as she reveals through narration and experience rather than mere factual detail what led her to this point. But scenes shared with Fred and Rita are wooden and almost painful to watch. The owner of ‘Cheeks’ is both straight out of central casting and, like Rita, only capable of a declaratory, emphatic monotone. His bouncer at least has an excuse: he’s supposed to be dumb. But this earnest monotony also describes most of the performances, which are generally one-note; we get sudden screaming by the van driver and his passenger and, of course, from Diana, but almost everyone else is muted.
None of the actors are helped by the script, either in terms of plotting or dialogue. I have a soft spot for economical B-movies, efficient productions that have a story to tell, limited resources with which to tell it, and which know that every word or cut counts. They can’t afford fancy or pricy script doctors and they usually aren’t written by accomplished playwrights with a knack for how people speak. I’m also a fan of so-bad-it’s-good, over-the-top dialogue, for florid and purple prose, for self-awareness and pretension; this movie’s only pretensions are to be found in its ideas. Here there are too many words in all the lengthy scenes. On the one hand they serve a function, mainly providing exposition and context, but at the same time we’re dealing with plain-spoken characters and with dialogue that might be a little elliptical, might focus not on a direct point but on the smalltalk of everyday life. And this would suggest and count as characterization if different characters (aside from a few leads) spoke in significantly different voices and if the weight of the words were passed through the actors.
That the movie is nearly two hours long is not itself an issue, but plotting and pacing both do it a disservice and make those hundred plus minutes linger beyond their welcome. “Naked Fear” is roughly divided into two parts: before and after Diana is abducted, though the dividing line is approximately three-fourths of an hour for the first part and almost an hour for the second. The second includes and involves more tense, visceral chase scenes, but these are then undercut by leaving the wilderness and returning to Dwight’s supposed investigation. Dwight’s ‘function’ in the end is to reveal Colin’s crimes and clear Diana, and so his own story serves to determine whether he will steer a safe path — as Tom urges, as Karley ends up suggesting — or whether he will join Rita in attempting to discover the truth. But this is all immaterial. With Colin’s death his home would have eventually been investigated and his torture room discovered. Diana would have still gone to the hospital and still chewed through her restraints, and still, perhaps, become the vigilante the movie ends with. We otherwise have neither investment in nor closure to Dwight’s story; both he and Diana are new to town and can function as audience surrogates of sorts, but given that he’s not in Diana’s story for most of it he serves little function or the audience, who would figure out the killer’s identity without Dwight’s aid.
When presented with a nameless serial killer in fiction, one of the possible and common stories to tell involves revealing the killer’s identity, as this can provide both tension and misdirection, which then keep an audience involved both emotionally and intellectually. That, however, was not of interest here, as Colin’s identity was revealed before Diana’s abduction and before it became clear to her, and was heavily suggested by not so subtle hints earlier in the movie. And yet the movie wants to have it both ways: it wants its red herrings and it wants to be a movie not about the identity of the killer but about the chase, the hunt. And if the movie wants to be partially about the killer’s identity, it needed to proceed much more confidently. Tom is set up as a red herring, at least temporarily, when he unpacks his new scope and focuses so intently and intensely upon it. But if we’re going to commit to red herrings, we must commit to multiple potential suspects, so why not the nice, new guy in town who also likes to hunt? Or why not strongly suggest that more than one hunter partakes of this particular sport? Or even more strongly suggest that Tom knows about Colin and is willing to cover it up?
But if the story is not about the identity of the killer but rather about the hunting and about the victim — in this case Diana –, why reveal the killer at all? We’ve never been given a good reason to care about Colin as a character or as the killer; his explicit motivation comes down to wanting something more challenging to hunt than a deer or elk, but that’s just a trope. The hunting/chase sequences mid-film are probably the movie’s strongest. Generally the audience is attached to Diana’s perspective, limited as it is, and the tension grows out of this and the accompanying pacing. A few shots from this sequence also take a more distanced, almost chessboard view from above, showing hunter and hunted in the same field but out of view of each other, one stalking and the other hiding. It’s deliberate and lean, unlike most everything that takes place in town.
In the end the failure of the film has to rest on the shoulders of Thom Eberhardt, and that “Naked Fear” is no good is in a way surprising, as Eberhardt’s previous output — such as “Night of the Comet” (1984), “Gross Anatomy” (1989), and even “Captain Ron” (1992) — suggest greater competence, vision, and humor. The languid, solemn and mostly wordless opening sequence and the repetition of certain motifs (returning to and focusing on the eyes of the mounted animals, for example) suggest some other film that Eberhardt wanted to make.
III.
Even a cursory viewing of “Naked Fear” makes it almost impossible to think of the film without also thinking about the tropes and traditions it engages and takes part in, specifically its allegories of objectification, hunting humans, and serial killer narratives.
We love our serial killers. We love the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and Dexter Morgan and anything with Hannibal Lector in it. We even let FOX renew “The Following”. When a TV police procedural needs a Big Bad, even if only for a few episodes, it likes to pull out the serial killer, often of the genius variety, the kind that can outsmart our protagonists, if only for a little while. And we like our killers quirky: smart, more than a little disturbed, and likely possessed of a trademark technique, method, or preferred victim type.
Fictional serial killers often flaunt it: they leave calling cards, they play games, the position bodies to be found. Colin Mandel, though, is another kind of killer: he doesn’t leave bodies for the police, and he’s doing it just for himself. But he has a type and he’s killed a half dozen … definitely a serial killer. One obvious inspiration for Colin in “Naked Fear” is the real life story of Robert Hansen (born 1939), who killed 17 to 21 in Alaska, and Ivan Robert Marko Milat, who killed 7 tourists in Australia. In addition to serving as inspiration for Colin Mandel here, Hansen is portrayed by John Cusack in “The Frozen Ground” (2013). For better or for worse portrayals of fictional serial killers often center around the (damaged) psychologies of said killers, especially their (childhood) traumas, neuroses and psychoses.
Yet here in Colin Mandel we encounter a killer devoid of the regular motivations or motives; he fits neither the profile of his explicit predecessors or similar prototypes, nor does he possess a significant goal or agenda. Superficially he fits the type, as he seems to target prostitutes and similar, but while his preferred prey matches the genre he has no backstory or characterization to serve as a foundation for his actions. He is just an image of misogynistic evil.
Besides the bottom-up, clinical profile of serial killers we also have in film killer masterminds, the kind who wish to teach us a lesson (notwithstanding that they, too, may have past trauma as the origin of their deeds, over which the moralizing and spreading of manifestos is more rationalizing than rationale), such as Jigsaw from the ‘Saw’ series of film. Here we have our top-down, idea-first killer.
“Naked Fear” gives us less an idea-first killer than a “hey, wouldn’t it be cool …” idea for a movie: let’s hunt humans. There are obvious inspirations to be found in “The Most Dangerous Game” (Richard Connell, 1924) and Cornel Wilde’s 1966 film, “The Naked Prey”. If traditional serial killer films find their foundations in a kind of portrayal of ‘real life’, as depictions of ‘true crime’ stories, and the frequently intelligent but at least hyper-scheming and usually thematic killer of a “Se7en” or “Saw” provides a kind of social, moral commentary, then no less so than the ‘Scream’ franchise do these stories serve as genre commentaries and deconstructions. In the case, for example, of “The Most Dangerous Game” we have one artistic work commenting on and adapting a previous genre, that of the big-game hunting safaris. The twist is merely, “the hunter becomes the hunted”. In this regard “Naked Fear” fits a long line of human-prey movies, with its most notable recent cousins being the ‘Hostel’ films, to which it seems to be the Lifetime movie equivalent.
Finally, the focus on Diana’s pre-abduction story, Rita’s obsession, the inclusion of Fred, Tom’s exposition, and Dwight’s investigation of the missing women shifts the focus from Colin as killer and Diana as prey and more toward the movie as an allegory of objectification. While Colin also kills men when ‘necessary’, he only hunts women, who are treated as trophies. The crass reduction of women to objects of desire at ‘Cheeks’, Diana’s relative powerlessness vis-a-vis Fred, and how she and Rita are kept essentially as caged animals is then treated non-metaphorically in the second half. From almost all corners there is willful ignorance and a need not to help; no one searches for the missing women, they are just “those kind of women”, as Karley reminds us, and even the van driver and passenger are more interested in saving their own skins than in helping Diana. The ‘noble’ father of the camping party has to remind one son not to gawk or leer at the tempting flesh. For the owner of ‘Cheeks’ Diana and the rest are merely monetary investments. Minus the nudity, this could be any basic cable morality tale about the dangers of leaving home, of dancing and stripping, of becoming “that sort” of woman. But as in “Showgirls” and similar, the moralizing is accompanied by a heavy dose of exploitation.
IV.
Jason Buchanan provides the following synopsis of “Naked Fear”:
Joe Montegna and Danielle De Luca headline Ratz director Thom Erberhardt’s thriller about a frightened stripper forced into a deadly game of human survival. Diana (De Luca) was attempting to start a new life in Santa Paula, New Mexico when she made a disturbing discovery: the strippers in this small southwestern town have been disappearing in droves, the victims of an elusive kidnapper. Before Diana can make sense of the crimes, she becomes the latest stripper to vanish from Santa Paula without a trace. Dropped off in the middle of the desert naked and defenseless, Diana finds herself the human target of a depraved hunter. If she can only find a means to turning the tables on her pursuer and somehow gaining the upper hand, perhaps Diana can give him a deadly dose of his own sadistic medicine.
Wikipedia provides, “The plot revolves around a dancer who is lured to a strange town and thrown into a deadly game after being kidnapped by a serial killer.” The Amazon.com ‘editorial review’ for the DVD states, “In a small town a number of strippers have been mysteriously disappearing. Diana, a new arrival to town soon finds out why when a mysterious gun man kidnaps her for a terrifying game of hunter and the hunted . Set free naked in the wild she is forced to try and outwit her captor before she becomes his latest victim.”
This is the movie as idea, the movie as plot summary. This is not the movie, however, that one has scene by scene. Diana spends very little time dealing with the discovery that women in Santa Paula have gone missing; that is more Rita’s and Dwight’s story and something that Tom mainly ignores. The first three-quarter of an hour setting the stage: showing the conclusion of the preceding hunt, providing an introduction to too many characters and potential stories, developing Diana’s arc. Only then is she abducted (at about the 42 minute mark) and set in the wilderness (around minute 44). A second movie appears at that point, but its momentum is frequently halted whenever we return to town to check in on Dwight, Rita, and Tom. Given the discrepancies between the movie as described and the movie as realized over about a hundred and four minutes, I wonder: what might make it more interesting?
Better? Just ‘Other’?
[1] Dwight and Karley.
Dwight serves almost no purpose in the Diana story; but I can imagine one of several purposes in the movie. The first is a moral and ethical discussion, as Dwight is the upstanding, principled officer who, although tempted to quit, ends up fighting for Diana. This is Dwight in the movie as presented.
Two darker versions of the movie’s world would appear, in a more Hostel-like sense, in strong and weak varieties of the town colluding with Colin. In one, which we almost already have, the town turns a blind eye to what is going on. When Rita goes out early in the movie, the shopkeeper wants to hear nothing about her missing friend. It only happens to “those kind” of girls; Colin’s diner, on the other hand, is family-centric, and he suggests to Dwight that Santa Paula is a great place to raise a family. Tom runs the town in a good-ol-boy fashion, keeping track of undesirable elements (Fred), keeping in touch with his hunting buddies, eating at Colin’s, acting as father-figure-mentor to Dwight, and so on. And Karley warns Dwight not to get involved, not to lose this job; her security is more important than doing what is right. The more sinister take on this would be a town that did not just passively enable Colin, but which, in certain quarters at least, actively participated. What if Tom were part of Colin’s “hunting club”? What if Dwight were “recruited”? What sort of cinematic world would it be if in the fight between upright town and border-of-town dance (strip) club the abusive club environment was the safer location?
The former level of enabling is already hinted at and would require little change to the movie; the latter would necessitate restructuring, and the movie could not end shortly after Diana escaped from Colin, but would have to continue with Colin defeated but the town and other hunters her next enemy; she would awaken from a bad dream into a nightmare.
In the movie as presented there is no need for Dwight except to pad the film’s length; but Dwight the L.A. or similar cop newly relocated to small-town, boom-town New Mexico, a town that is too-good-to-be-true in-town and a den of scum and villainy at ‘Cheeks’ (and probably elsewhere) is the beginning of television show, the Southwest version of “Twin Peaks”, perhaps, and the disappearance of Diana Kelper is this movie’s Laura Palmer, but a Laura Palmer who fought back.
And this was the two-hour series premiere.
[2] Diana.
It’s best to eliminate Dwight and Karley; various synopses tell me that this is Diana’s story, my own viewing suggests that it is Dian’s story, and if it’s Diana’s story, then cinematically make it hers. Reduce or almost eliminate scenes not involving her; do maintain her arrival in town and encounters with Fred, keep her working at the club, maintain and elaborate her relationship with Rita.
This is the story about the main character finding herself, dealing with and working through trauma. Diana leaves her small-town Texas upbringing and hopes to find herself in a big city, at least a place larger than where she grew up. But disappointment sets in, and then she begins to be beaten down. Fred controls her money and her freedom; her job description changes from ‘dancing’ to ‘exotic dancing’ to ‘stripping’. She moves from ‘wage slave’ (with a percentage taken by Fred) to needing to make her money via ‘tips’, to becoming an uninsured ‘independent contractor’ as a new-to-the-game prostitute. This is a spiral out of control and rock-bottom is within sight.
Except it’s not.
She is abducted, set in the wilderness, and must avoid flight and learn to fight for her life. She lived in squalor with Rita; now she is without food or clothing or shelter. She was ogled and groped and seen as metaphorical meat; now she is hunted as just another kind of prey.
And yet I despise this direction, even though the binary structure (see also: medieval failure and redemption tales, see also “Parzival” (W. v. Eschenbach), and so on) lends itself to easy allegory and a poetic narrative, for the content here, focused on beating down Diana, and showing her “how much worse” it could be, seems almost like a typical fascist fable. In the end of the movie as presented we have Diana reborn as a vigilante, “doing unto others …”, but she’s just become the predator. There is little empowerment here; only by giving up hopes and dreams and becoming the mirror image of the man who had abused her does she go on.
The end reminds me not a little of the conclusion to “Teeth”, and so “Naked Fear” almost serves as a companion piece, but here we end not with horror or terror, an unsettled feeling, but with vicarious pleasure. Violence is triumphant. We might as well have been cheering for Colin.
But back to making this Diana’s story. Part of her objectification comes from the camera, and often explicitly, as well the camera becomes and eye looking through a rifle scope. When Diana awakens naked in the wilderness she hides part of her body as if out of modesty; perhaps this is an external necessity, to reduce the amount of full-frontal nudity on display, but it comes across as awareness of a viewer. She is still on display; all attempts to make her an agent are undercut by maintaining her status as object of a gaze. And if this is Diana’s story — and not Diana vs. Colin –, why do we even identify Colin as a person? Why does he not stay anonymous, why do we not maintain that tension, that suspense, that fear that it could be anyone in town?
[3] Focus.
Character and theme are not the only targets of focus in this or other movies. In terms of character focus, this could be Diana’s, Colin’s, or Dwight’s story. The last leads to a television series, a focus on Colin would tell the story — motives and methods, for example — of a killer, and the first would be slim, trim, and driven, gliding though social commentary, thriller, and action-adventure.
These are abstract, conceptual matters of focus, matters of story and direction, not of cinematic realization.
Salient cinematic means are employed at the film’s beginning; every shot and cut seems purposive, laden not with meaning but with intent. An experience is conveyed, lived in. Detail is also paid in the follow-up, as Colin puts away a trophy and stows his box on the gun cabinet. But from that point on exposition and sloppy functionalism dominate; repeated images are merely short-hand and signifiers, ciphers. Even successive panoramic shots of daybreak or sunset serve merely narrative, not aesthetic ends. And aesthetic means could serve to unify the plethora of material already present in the movie.
Besides bad acting and a bad script, there are just too many ideas, and among other things this results in not enough development of other characters, such as Dwight and Karley. Theirs is not really another focal point story, as only Diana’s really matters, but within this larger narrative Karley represents a ‘non-fallen woman’ (someone in a stable relationship, on the right side of the tracks) who participates — calling Diana a slut, referring to “girls like that” — in the ever-present patriarchy that makes Colin possible. We have other people who want to look the other way, and so on; it’s hinted at insofar as nobody cares about the missing women, but this is not a foreground story: it belongs in the background or middleground.
The critical metaphor here might be that of a painting or a sequence/series of paintings and of composition. The foreground provides our main story and plot, details and analysis. The supplies confusion: snippets and relationships, thematic material that recurs and is suggested but not overly explained. The background gives us hints, motifs, things not commented upon by characters but that make up the world; the background is silent. Such composition plays a role in several of the outdoor scenes, scenes that require characters to move extensively in space, shifting focus. But in town there is only fore- and background; the latter is all period details, trinkets, things to make the world ‘real’, to the point of being trite and cliche. It’s realistic in an After School Special way but hardly suggests a real world, ominous or otherwise; it feels borrowed rather than created. In the foreground characters discuss rather than do, and what should belong to the middleground too often finds foreground focus and obtains dedicated scenes that disrupt the flow of the movie.
V.
But why even bother with the what-ifs of a straight-to-DVD release featuring no-names and a few you-might-recognize-from actors in a production by a director who has seen better days?
Perfect is boring. Some might find perfection morally inspirational, an ideal to which we imperfect mortals might aspire. Perfection shows us a gap between mundane reality and that which can be achieved, even if perfection itself cannot be achieved. But in terms of aesthetics and in terms of creativity perfection is boring, a non-starter. Perfection need not, by definition, be improved. A perfect work has no what-ifs or as-ifs, and perfect, as Kant realizes, implies a concept; to be perfect means complete or finished, and complete or finished requires a standard against which to be measured. Perfect is a perfect something, which also suggests that meaning is to found outside the art object itself in that which it is an example of. I don’t want a perfect horse or painting thereof; I don’t want a perfect statue of a perfect, beautiful figure; I don’t want the perfect piece of unchanging music; I don’t want a perfect love story or a perfect movie. From the imperfect we can learn; in the imperfect we see how art functions. We can ask how something works or doesn’t work.
As a viewer or observer I can take pleasure in the perfect, or at least the very, very good; as a critic I learn equally from the flawed and the excellent; as a creator I find the poor execution of half-baked ideas a jumping off point for my own endeavors.
Notes
- I watched “Naked Fear” the evening of Monday, April 8 and composed most of these notes on the morning of the 9th.
- View the trailer! … plus, it gives you the killer, shows that she survives long enough to “become the hunter”, and so on.
- You know it’s 2013 when even movies from 2007 have a Facebook page
- Amazon.de is happy to provide you with “Naked Fear 2” (Uncut), and even “Naked Fear 1-3“, a box set that incorporates two further direct-to-DVD “sequels” to a direct-to-DVD movie
- It’s worth noting that the “sequels” bear about the same relationship to the original as “Troll 2” does to “Troll” or “8mm 2” does to “8mm”. Actually, it’s worse than that: “Naked Fear 2” is actually just “The Abducted” (2009), ‘starring’ Kathleen Benner (it’s also known as “Match.Dead”); “Naked Fear 3” is just a retitled “From the Shadows” (also 2009) starring Kal Bennett.
- I do like imagining this as a companion piece to both “Teeth” and “Showgirls”.
