The Worst Film Ever

the audience applauded

I wanted to but couldn't!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This movie is disgusting and repugnant on so many levels. I feel like suing the production company. It is difficult to describe how terrible the cops are in this movie. They are portrayed as completely unprofessional and abusive to women. It destroys any credibility this movie might have had. Madeleine is great but the other actors are awful. This is like a really bad B movie. Who wrote and directed this? A five year old? The movie begins with a cop stripping. How pathetic and ridiculous! And what is that, Celtic music? Give me a break! Then our star actress witnesses a murder after getting her sight back. This could be a decent plot line, but not so fast. She goes to the cops and initially they don't believe her. Wow, how original. Nobody has ever seen that in a plot line before. These idiots, that are poorly acted, are extremely abusive, and their language is unnecessarily vulgar. When a movie is devoid of any redeeming quality, it is easy to just throw in a bunch of curse words. The star cop is physically and verbally abusive, he assaults Emma more than once and somehow we are supposed to believe that he is her love interest? The kid whose mother is killed isn't even upset and he gives the cop some campy, sarcastic line. When do I stop throwing up?

Blink is directed by Michael Apted and written by Dana Stevens. It stars Madeleine Stowe, Aidan Quinn, James Remar, Paul Dillon, Peter Friedman, Bruce A. Young and Laurie Metcalfe. Music is by Brad Fiedel and cinematography by Dante Spinotti. Story sees Stowe as Emma Brody, who after being blind for 20 years receives a double cornea transplant that mostly restores her sight. However, she's subject to something known as "retroactive vision" which means that what her blurry vision at first sees doesn't register to the brain sometime later. A problem, now, because there has been a murder committed upstairs at her apartment complex and she's the only "eye" witness to the murderer.It's all set up to be a standard woman in peril thriller, the kind that drops into the cinema on a yearly basis. But thanks to some technical smarts and a terrific performance by Stowe, Blink is one of the better films from this particular sub-genre. It's a bit saggy in the middle, where, probably thanks to the success of Basic Instint and Sea of Love in the five years previously, Apted and co try to turn it into an "erotic" thriller as Stowe and Quinn's surly copper form a relationship, but it's genuinely tense and the novelty of Emma's unusual affliction never wears thin.Apted and his team have devised a unique visual effect that lets us see the world through Emma's unusual eyes, and the result is very unsettling. Blurry focus blends with wobbly vision and this allows for scary moments that stretch the concept across the films running time. It's of course a hokey premise, and the formula at the core of the plot is nothing new, but the character of Emma, coupled with her "affliction" is. Emma is no poor victim looking for sympathy, she's spunky, sexy and not suffering fools gladly. She lives as an independent, plays fiddle in a Celtic rock band (The Drovers playing themselves) and is full of feminine whiles. Stowe really gets to grips with the character and convinces fully. Quinn is OK, plays sarcastic and moody with ease, while Apted has a keen eye for the Chicago locale and Spinotti's photography is gorgeous in colour tones.It needed a better, more frantic, ending, and that over played mid-section stops it from being from the top draw of thrillers, but otherwise it's well worth a look for potential first time viewers. 7/10

Madeline Stowe of "The Last of the Mohicans" fame stars in BLINK as a feisty musician who undergoes a new type of eye surgery to restore her vision, lost in childhood at the hands of an abusive mom. As her vision slowly returns, she runs afoul of a killer who is convinced she has gotten a good look at him, and is now after her. She tells the cops, who not surprisingly laugh at her. The irony is, she only sees the killer in a sort of surreal way, with the camera serving as Stowe's vision and showing us what amounts to little more than phantasms. She also suffers from mental time gaps with her returning vision. Stowe ends up falling for burly cop Aidan Quinn, who decides she's telling the truth and protects her. There's a nice trick at the very end involving the killer. Suspenseful and stylish for its time, with a thoughtful performance by Stowe.

I'm surprised by some of the negative reviews: this film was suspenseful and, at times, genuinely scary. But, then again, some of the IMDB reviews of "Sixth Sense" were so scathing that I nearly passed-by watching one of the best movies of the past few years. While this is certainly no "Sixth Sense", it is a well-made film. The entire cast does a a fine job, the dialog is well-written (although I don't care for the protagonist's strong profanity: it sounds especially disgusting coming from a female's mouth), the cinematography is excellent, and the plot twists and turns remain sufficiently believable. I've given it a 7 out of 10.