I was minding my own business after coming home from a doctors appointment, and my girlfriend is watching The Rendering. It is one of those crappy chick flik dramas and stars Shannen Doherty. I mostly ignored it by surfing the web for info on the new Champions Online game and the upcoming Star Trek Online, but I was able to pick up a few key plot points.
Shannen Doherty is a police sketch artist and she does a sketch of a serial rapist and it looks just like her husband.
Oh wait… there are more twists and turns in this epic.
It ends up that her husband was framed by some guy, I don’t know his name but we will call him Dick. Dick had attacked her in the past and had been sent to prison for whatever he did or tried to do to Shannen Doherty. I missed the beginning of the movie so I am not sure about exactly what happened in the past, but I do know Dick held a grudge against Shannen Doherty. Also, I was not paying close attention as to how Dick orchestrated the plot to frame her husband, and plant evidence in their house from prison, but I was able to learn that Dick found a look alike for her husband in prison and had that guy do the rapes.
Later I catch a detail where Dick convinces Shannen Doherty that he will promise to keep her husband safe in prison if she testifies at his parole hearing and he gets out. Naturally, she does this and Dick is released.
In shocking plot twist, it ends up that it was a mistake for her to trust the word of the guy who attacked her and framed her husband for crimes he didn’t commit, but she does and Dick turns on her.
Again, I missed how this criminal was able to arrange it, but he gets the guards to move a killer to Shannen Doherty’s husbands cell. The guard even gave an evil/maniacal laugh when putting the guy in the cell with her husband. But, miraculously when the rumble takes place, after lights out, her husband ended up killing the killer.
At this point I am watching the movie with my full attention, and because it is so bad, I must comment about it to the girlfriend. Apparently she missed some details while I was critiquing the film, so she rewinds it and that’s when I realize this isn’t live tv and she got sucked into a bad movie.
Noooo.
She recorded it on the DVR.
Now, before we continue the review, lets get something straight, my girlfriend has a knack for hogging all the space on our DVR with cooking shows and crime dramas. It is usually so full there is no space to record what I want, even though I am supposedly the one that can’t share, because I am an only child, but unlike me, my girlfriend, the eldest of five, has sharing mastered.
As you can tell, this is an “issue” between her and I. And I had to comment on how she defiled our DVR with this awful movie, and this is why we were unable to record the Daily Show and Colbert Report last night and the premiere of Ghost Hunters International last week when we were out of town, because “The Renderering” was taking up space.
OK, let me take a deep breath and continue my review of this so called “movie.”
So, almost immediately, the police realize she was right about the plot to frame her husband, they arrest Dick and let her husband out of prison immediately. This time I did not miss how this happened, they just realized the dead guy in the cell was a murderer and that was all the proof they needed to let her husband go. How they caught Dick, I’ll never know. But you see cops bringing him in as they let out Shannen Dohertys husband. Fortunately this gives Dick the chance to practice his acting and make a menacing face at Shannen Doherty and her husband.
So, you think the movie is over, as Shannen Doherty and her husband have sex, and he comments that the thought of this is what kept him alive in prison. They then decide they are going on vacation because, “they both deserve it after all that has happened.”
While the happy couple packs, we cut away to Dick in the back of a cop car, where he fakes a heart attack or something and one of the cops climbs in the back seat to help, without his gun drawn or his partner covering him. (The partner stays in the front passenger seat). Dick chokes the cop with hand cuffs and gets his gun. Now the partner gets on the radio and Dick shoots them both.
Cut to the phone ringing and the answering machine going off, and the cops leaving a message for Shannen Doherty that Dick has escaped, but she is drying her hair and misses it. When she comes out her husband is gone and Dick left her a note on where to find them.
She shows up, Dick tries to kill her. She fights with him and holds her own against a hardened criminal who was recently released from prison and only prevails when Dick accidentally hits his head on a nail sticking out of the wall and is killed.
Shannen unties her husband, and as they walk off, she says, “Lets go home.” Neither of them looks even remotely upset or distressed or even relieved that they just got out of a life and death situation. They just blandly walk off and the credits roll.
In short, I think the writers, the directors, actors and even editors just gave up at the end of this film.
So as a movie I give it one out of five stars.
As a movie that is MS3TK-able, I give it four and a quarter stars, and a full five for the last ten minutes.
I would say check it out, but really, I don’t know that it is a good idea.
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