 | Ted V Mikels Introduces Us To the Lovely Jeannine Riley
rating: 5
I bought this film because of what was sure to be the winning combination of Jeannine Riley being scripted and directed by Ted V Mikels. There are plenty of things I'd like to do to the adorable Jeannine Riley but, until seeing this film, I never would have thought that strangling her would be one of them.
This film is gloriously dull. The opening chase between the psycho gunman and the "hero" lasts about 20 minutes and nothing at all happens except one chases the other (sort of similar to the abominably tedious car chase in Fear is The Key where the two cars just drive down a dead-straight storm canal for 20 minutes) whilst really dramatic Saturday morning matinee serial-film music blares away. You get the impression that Ted would use the same music if the psycho went to a post office to buy a stamp.
I would have said that the film is padded out with plenty of stock footage of forest fires, water dumping 'planes, skydivers and a vast array of woodland animals looking cute and bears scratching themselves against trees. But I've had to nix this because, in the interview with Ted on the DVD, he explains in great detail how he actually filmed all these bits himself.
The interview also explains the wonderfully silly segue into and out of the flashback sequence (which, apparently, was insisted on by "Hollywood" in order to place the nail-biting chase scene at the beginning to grab our attention). The flashback takes up about half the film and (apart from making you hope that lovey-dovey Jeannine and her insipid "hero" get killed by the psycho asap) seems to be there solely to flash neon arrows at one important bit of plot development, that, and here is a masterstroke from Ted, is then immediately and deftly sidestepped 10 seconds after the flashback finishes.
Obviously, then, the psycho will eventually get his come-uppance, just as he's about to pull the trigger, by the two mysterious guys who parachuted into the forest fire as the result, we assume, of Jeannine's beau giving a glaringly obvious internationally-accepted code for: "Although I'm saying everything is fine, I'm actually saying help, we're in dire trouble, please send in a few paras to save us" on the telephone to the park rangers whilst he has a gun pointed at his head.
But you'll have to watch the film to find this out.
Let's just say that one seemingly REALLY IMPORTANT bit of inserted "stock footage" is never explained, presumably because Ted only put it in because he had gone to great trouble and expense to film it and thought it turned out looking pretty darn impressive.
And I can't finish without mentioning the great song that the blues piano player sings in the cocktail bar during the "hitting the town" segment of the flashback sequence. I'm not sure if this is called "Love Is For The Birds" or "Strange Are The Ways Of Love", but it features probably the best blues couplet of all time:
"I've had my fill of misery.
And things."
0/10. Brilliant!
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