Rating: C
Dir: Michael Greenspan
Star: Katie Cassidy, Tracy Spiridakos, Donal Logue, Adam DiMarco
After her roommate goes missing, when coming home from her bar job, Amanda (Cassidy) finds a replacement in vet student, Hayley (Spiridakos). Initially, Hayley seems perfect, rescuing Amanda from her stalkerish boyfriend (DiMarco). But things take a turn for the much darker, when the boyfriend returns, with even less pleasant intent, and has an axe embedded in the back of his head by Hayley. The pair dispose of the body, but it gives Hayley some massive leverage over Amanda, because the murder weapon has her fingerprints all over it. And Hayley has something she wants to accomplish in the murder line, and needs Amanda’s help to do so.
She has been harbouring a grudge against her abusive father (Logue), telling Amanda that he was responsible for her mother’s death, which was called “suicide.” But is that actually what happened? Or is Hayley spinning a tale of her own? I’m struggling to come up with meaningful insight here, because this was so eminently forgettable. While the elements you’d expect are all rolled out – even the brief lesbian canoodling – it seems to be more by the numbers, rather than with any genuine enthusiasm by those involved, on either side of the camera. It contains the expected number of twists, but neither in number nor execution are they memorable.
The leads, though competent enough not to be irritating, don’t bring anything beyond the obvious to their characters. And, while the material has some luridly exploitative potential, almost none of it is realized by Greenspan, who seems content to film things in the least interesting way possible, turning the net result into something which plays almost like an edgy Hallmark original movie, complete with abusive men. It’s hard to put your finger on any particularly poor aspects; however, it’s perhaps even tougher to come up with any reasons to bother with this.