Who payed the critics

A Disappointing Continuation

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The plot is so full of absurdities it is difficult to stay and see if the rest of the film is any good at all. Radha Mitchell is a waitress in a café all by herself near an abandoned highway. No one there to manage the place or watch it while she steps out for a break? The drifter drives up with a surfboard on his car. It seems his friends are surfers in this setting which seems to be far inland somewhere in the US, so do they plan to use a lake instead? Her dialog is more like a one liner list from 2 Broke Girls. "If you're a thief, go ahead and steal everything right now." She's always drawing conclusions without a thread of anything real to support them. I also grow tired of pointless setup shots filled with closeups of coffee pots and frying eggs or the thirty year old song from Blondie, Atomic Man.

WHEN STRANGERS APPEAR, a low budget Kiwi thriller set around a remote diner, has the potential to be a minor classic of the genre. It has a tight, focused script and lots of suspense scenes that work well given the constraints of the budget. A shame, then, that Scott Reynolds is a better writer than he is director, because it's the indifferent direction that really lets this down.The first half hour of the film is the best. We're introduced to the tough, focused heroine (an easy job for Radha Mitchell), her life, and the mysterious strangers who come into it. We don't know much and things work better that way. As the story goes on, though, it seems to become less focused and just involves people chasing other people around, and I felt less and less invested in the story. Sure, there are some good twists here, but by the time of the unbelievable climax I was eager for the story to end. The plot is too simplistic and the running time seems padded out.It's not all bad, and in places this is much better than your average Hollywood thriller, but it could have been so much more had greater effort been made in terms of staging and originality. More set-pieces and less waffle would have been better, I think. Still, there's quite a lot to commend here, not least some assured performances from Josh Lucas and Barry Watson.

Am I the only one that disliked this? I found myself rooting for the villains. For surely Radha Mitchell was absolutely the worst actress ever. Her screaming, over acting and generally annoying presence made me want the three guys to do her in. No such luck. She survives. I didn't even find her that attractive. With acting talent that maybe goes to a 2 level, she ruined this film for me. Scott Mitchell who wrote and directed this must have been in cloud nine when he cast her, as everybody else wasn't that bad. I liked Josh Lucas and Barry Watson and would like to see more of these guys in a more likable movie. Glad this was on LMN TV as I didn't have to pay for it. If I did, I'd ask for my money back. What kind of a name is Radha anyway?

Wow...I tell you what I really liked this movie when i saw it. I was sitting home watching lifetime and this happened to come on. I was so enthralled by this movie i couldn't turn away from it. I love Josh Lucas in this movie. I had always been a huge fan of him, like it Sweet Home Alabama. But in this movie you got to see him act in a different way, he actually got to take on a darker roll. I didn't think that it would work but it totally did! This movie was full of twists and turns. Reading the other comments everyone says that they didn't like the ending but i thought that the ending was pretty good. How they made it switch on and on from person to person. It was a little bit hard to follow but in the end it made it all that much more worth it. I would definitely recommend this movie!