Held for Ransom (2000) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) |
| Wow, talk about bad. At one time they must have intended this to be a real movie. It stars Dennis Hopper in his psycho bad guy avatar, and even features cameos from former night-soap queens Morgan Fairchild and Joan van Ark, which is kinda fun. And then the filmmakers lost their way. When the finally put this together, I guess they had given up all hope of a distribution deal, and they just cut it fast to sell it to Blockbuster for an exclusive deal. Blockbuster is hungry for exclusive product, and I suppose they were impressed by having an exclusive on a film with Dennis Hopper instead of the usual Czech SF crap. |
| They should
have stuck with the Eastern European films. The filmmakers didn't care at all about the final product here. They just churned out whatever fulfilled their contract. Some necessary transitions were missing, no explanation. Some scenes were assembled in the wrong order. A couple scenes are too dark to see what's going on. |
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| Hopper
captures a school bus. (Sound familiar?) He takes a few
kids out of the bus, and holds them deep in the swamp, in
a cabin surrounded by hungry gators and water moccasins.
He demands a ransom from their parents. Turns out that he kidnapped some poor kids by mistake, and their parents can only afford to pay the ransom in old rusted-out Ford 351 engines and microwave burritos. Or something like that. And then it turns out that the parents arranged to kidnap their own kids or something. I think it's because burritos are tax deductible if you have to pay them to kidnappers. Or something. Who cares? |
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Avoid this turkey. | ||
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