Well Deserved Praise

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

The movie is surprisingly subdued in its pacing, its characterizations, and its go-for-broke sensibilities.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

A last-ditch entry into the 'erotic thriller' genre that started back in the early 1990s when the likes of BASIC INSTINCT popularised the genre. BARE WITNESS is lamentable in every respect: a rubbish, predictable storyline, gross sex scenes, cardboard acting, and thrills that'll make you laugh rather than jump.The villain of the story is a corrupt mayor who attempts to murder a rival; unfortunately for him, the assassin is caught on a sex tape filmed by a high class hooker. Soon enough the hunt is on for the tape as the hooker's friend and a cop join forces to help bring down those responsible.Everything about the film screams bargain basement and the shoddiness is unbelievable. The sex scenes are about as explicit as they can be in a non-pornographic production and yet they're deeply silly and/or sleazy, depending on your taste. Angie Everhart is about as appealing as a 2x4, while a chubby Daniel Baldwin wanders around and must be wondering what happened to his career. Unfortunately there's absolutely nothing to recommend about this one, which has to be the nadir in the careers of all involved.

A stripper/porn actress/call girl (Catalina Larranaga) sets up a video camera for her session with a hit-man client (she is a free-spirit making a "documentary" about her life). The tape keeps running after his boss (a corrupt land developer) and a bald, stocky henchman arrive to discuss a job that night and she is kicked out of the hotel room. Later, the hit-man shows up dressed as a waiter at a dinner party for a do-gooder mayoral candidate, and fires in the candidate's direction but instead wounds the city council chairman.Plump, stubble-faced cop Daniel Baldwin is cooling his heels outside the mansion, punished for having in the past mouthed off to the P.R.-obsessed mayor. To further establish him as a crude, irreverent he-man, Baldwin's character relieves himself on some bushes. Upon hearing the gunshots, he circles the house, notices an open kitchen window, and tries but fails to catch the shooter.When the hit-man later remembers the camera (for some reason he let the hooker set it up), and tells his boss it is now gone, the boss's slinky hellcat henchwoman (Laurin Reina) shoots him dead. The boss visits the set of a sleazy movie being produced by fat slob "Slim," who sometimes used Larranaga in his films. She soon arrives, dropped off by her concerned roommate, Angie Everhart, a bartender with a checkered past. Claiming to be a film producer, the boss abducts and kills Larranaga.Baldwin pointlessly gives Everhart a hard time in the police interrogation room. For no apparent reason, he completely changes to a softy when he takes her home. In some awkward scenes, the two become romantically involved, as she falls into danger from Reina and the stocky henchman, who are searching for the missing tape.Along the way, Reina turns on her boss. She attempts to lure low-life Slim into helping her find the tape, only to have him threaten to tell her boss (who he is already blackmailing), so she blows Slim away.Conveniently, a neighbor's question clues in Everhart that her dead roommate had taken her VCR to a repair shop with a tape stuck in it. Everhart recovers them. But just as she is watching the tape, Reina and the henchman loudly approach the house where she is staying, and, after a seemingly endless car and foot chase, abduct her (but not before she slips the tape to a bystander who passes it along to Baldwin). Baldwin has also learned that the real estate developer wants a highway built to a casino project in the desert and has made enormous campaign contributions to both the incumbent and the challenger.In the film's climax, Baldwin gives the tape to Reina in exchange for Everhart, who has "made a deal" with Reina (but what about the stocky henchman?). They rush to the scene of a victory dinner for the mayoral challenger and foil a clumsy attempt on her life by the developer himself, with the henchman back in tow with him. It turns out that the city council chairman was in the developer's pocket and would become mayor when the mayor-elect died. Baldwin and Everhart merely shrug as Reina runs scot-free over to a CNN news crew to sell the tape.Amazingly, the movie manages to be mildly enjoyable. The cast is a bunch of unknowns, and the title, acting, and story are lame. Baldwin is not cut out for the role of a rugged, romantic leading man. He seems to jump in and out of trying to play a character and mostly ends up acting as if he had been hauled in off the street to play himself. He comes across best as a messy, soft-spoken guy with some problems. His romance with Everhart is rushed and implausible. Her performance skates on the surface of a thin role. With a line-delivery that sometimes seems to miss a beat, she tries a little too hard to be serious and purposeful. But I was more impressed with her seriousness than with her plainer-than-expected looks. A feisty female detective is okay, but Willie Gault is a total dud as Baldwin's partner.The other characters, including Baldwin's gruff chief, are bland or exaggerated cardboard cut-outs. The developer acts like a big-shot but never does anything smart. His murder plot is based on a skimmed-over, cliché motive and is confusing and sloppy (he arranges either to make or fake an attempt on the challenger's life before she has even won; it is unclear whether shooting the councilman was even intended, and, annoyingly, Larranaga's tape sounds garbled on this point). The plan serves only to put the police on notice that she is a target, and the payoff is simply and unbelievably luring her out of a dinner party alone with a cell phone call for him to pull the trigger on her himself. He seems clueless in the tape search and about Reina's scheming.Reina is sexy and spirited enough to be fun to watch. But to suggest, as one review does, that simply because, without explanation, the movie lets her get away clean with known, multiple murders, kidnapping, assault, and robbery, that this is some sort of profound statement about life, rather than just flip, half-baked writing, is straining to find meaning in all the wrong places. Whether or not something "happens a lot in real life" does not, as the review assumes, automatically make it meaningful, interesting, entertaining, or credible when made the subject of a particular work of fiction.Overall, there are enough threads to the story, and enough colorful caricatures on the make on the wild side, to hold some interest. Because of the involved plot, and because Baldwin, Everhart, and Larranaga make likable enough "good guys" to root for against the various "bad guys," the clumsy weaknesses can more easily be taken in stride as something fun to laugh at. This is an above-average, 4-star entry in a low-budget, formulaic, exploitation genre.

Angie Everhart... Personally, I love her looks, accept her acting, and don't expect much from her films. This one, however, is pretty bad. Daniel Baldwin (of whom I'd never heard) is a HORRIBLE actor. He becomes this caricature of a man to whom this goddess of a woman is somehow attracted. Their love scene lacks credibility, to be polite. Showcasing beautiful Angie, it also blatantly tries to hide blubbery Daniel, this bargain-bin Baldwin. If you saw a graceful swan trying to make love to a bloated buzzard corpse, you'd find it hard to believe your eyes.Rent "Sexual Predator" instead, though it has the same problem with her troll of a boyfriend. But there's muuuuch more Angie...

Spoilers herein.Naturally, you already know this is worthless.The story is a simple shuffle of the `implicating tape' hassle -- its amazing how often this happens (this time with the killer's name scrawled in blood). There's other self-reference: Angie as a former `actress' that couldn't hack it. A fat slob that's her `producer' who is just like Baldwin only moreso. Her character's aversion to making sex films, precisely the opposite of the actor's.I've slogged through a few of Angie's projects, and its interesting to see her work. Her job has nothing to do with the character, but to make herself look appealing. Any actress knows that film beauty is a manufactured product. Most work with a single facial feature and build a whole person around it. Angie acts with her hair. See how she arranges to have it lit according to the Hepburn formula. She has very little to work with actually.There's a very minor role here by someone named Nellie Sciutto. She's a secretary and she actually tries to act. Makes everyone else look bad.Ted's Evaluation: 1 of 4 -- You can probably find something better to do with this part of your life.