Strong and Moving!

As Good As It Gets

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

I've seen this movie before-about 17 years ago! It was called Buried Alive and starred Tim Matheson and Jennifer Jason Leigh and aired on the USA cable network. The plot was nearly identical the only difference was happened after the husband comes back. Buried Alive was better written, directed, and acted. Taken on it's own merits, Living Death was okay but nothing special. Having seen Buried Alive, Living Death was monotonous at best. Kristy Swanson was cardboard. None of the characters were developed fully. There was waaaay too much going on. Which I'm sure was intentional to make the simple-minded viewer not realize that the story couldn't stand on it's own. What was the deal with the med students? Did we really need them for the plot? Nope. I would watch this movie again.

(Spoiler alert: partially discloses plot)This flick is not as bad as I might have thought. It actually has a somewhat interesting plot. The sound quality stinks though, turn it up high enough to hear the dialogue and the "music" (such as it is) is overwhelmingly loud and blasts you away.Caddish rich-heir-from-Daddy husband, sexy wife (yum, great kisser) and her lover, his best friend. Wife and lover off the cad with blowfish-poison. Only he doesn't die, he is paralyzed like dead but still sees and hears everything but can't move a muscle ("Living Death"). He wakes up on the autopsy table and goes on a revengefest. A medieval torture stretching rack features twice in this horror-genre flick. Daddy had a hobby, a fully equipped attic medieval dungeon that hubby, and implicitly his wife, use for fun and games. The movie starts with yon cad entertaining a lady friend up there with some erotic moderate stretching on a large angled rack (severe unpadded heavy iron manacles, ouch). Things go awry when his wife surprises them. Startled, he leans too hard on the lever and damages the rackee. One gets an impression of the rack's dismembering strength but pictures of the mechanism are unpersuasive, just closeups of gears meshing and chains and ropes tightening. The rack figures again at the end of the movie in the vengeancefest, this time as a torture and execution means. No erotic BDSM this time, but pain and dismemberment. The scene suggests the horror of the real thing beyond erotica when it was used for torture and punishment, much less execution. Anyway, I've seen worse horror-genre flicks. If you're a rack aficionado it's worth a look.

I agree with the first review, totally.But I have to remind the previous reviewer that Kristy Swanson was in "Dude, Where's My Car?" and has not totally been off the screens for the past decade.She does however look ... well, if she were a book, I'd describe her as 'slightly foxed'. Still, she looks better now than she did on the box cover of the 10th anniversary Buffy re-release.This was a 'blind' viewing for me ... I had no knowledge of the film, other than a glimmer of the plot, and was expecting something of a much lower budget than this ... made for TV perhaps ... so the reason I give it a slightly higher score than the previous reviewer is that it hits a higher level of production value than I was expecting it to.

Living Death: 5 out of 10: If you ever wondered what Body Heat 2 would look like if remade this year and having Kathleen Turner reprising her original role this movie may clue one in? Kristy Swanson hasn't spent much time on the big screen since the mid-nineties and she looks like she has been eating a lot of her namesakes Hungry Man dinners. Don't get me wrong she is attractive as a full-figured woman it simply was a bit disconcerting after not seeing her for a dozen years or so. She certainly hasn't spent that time fine tuning her thespian craft however as she is defiantly the acting weak point in this little drama.The plot has Shannon Tweed/ Tim Matheson written all over it. Abusive do nothing playboy husband is killed by suffering wife and his best friend/lawyer who is now her lover. Only problem is that they choose a poison that if given in the wrong dose only causes the person to appear dead. D'oh.He comes back and gets revenge on everyone who wronged him. Sounds like your very standard erotic thriller except it isn't.There is no nudity and virtually no sex. The only bondage is the decidedly non-erotic leg breaking kind. This is a straight up horror movie and it puts the pedal to the metal.Main lead Greg Byrk captures our evil protagonist's hedonism perfectly. (The scene where he snorts coke while playing videogames is a classic.) The revenge isn't fair or just it is bloody and cruel.This creates a great vibe in the film as the only guy to root for is a remarkably unlikable rogue. In fact the film has virtually not one likable hero style character giving an almost Bad Santa feel to the proceedings.The film picks up the pace about halfway through and never lets go. Not a great film or a genre classic by any means but certainly an entertaining horror film.