DVD Review: Things You Don’t Tell
Things You Don’t Tell (2006)
Studio: Anthem Pictures
DVD Release Date: August 19, 2008
Directed By: Alex Milli
Cast: Ryan Reyes, Ed Villaume, Amanda Baumann, Noel Thurman, Dan Lookabill
Brutal As Hell Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
Review By: Annie Riordan
I had this movie on my Netflix queue for nearly three months before I finally received it. And folks, not only was it not worth the wait, but I think I may need some serious therapy to heal the scarring that this excruciating viewing experience inflicted upon my psyche.
Okay, so…there’s this guy. No wait…first, there’s this other guy. He looks like the bastard offspring of Owen Wilson and William Katt and he apparently took acting lessons from a piece of particle board. Anyway, he’s having an affair with this chick who owns a flower shop and, oh yeah, he’s married. So one day he gets caught making out with his girlyfriend by his seriously disturbed brother-in-law, who likes to call himself The Hawk, after the vigilante cartoon superhero guy that he spends all his time drawing.
Then, there’s The Hawk’s sister, only you don’t find out it’s his sister until the end of the movie. She’s taken her two bratty kids on the run for some deranged reason and spends a lot of time shrieking incoherently at her daughter in a voice that sounds like a dental drill going through hyperdrive. Other stuff happens, none of it very interesting, and WHY exactly was this movie a Very Long Wait item again? The plot is so ridiculously convoluted that it swiftly unravels any sense of realism it might have been hoping for at its conception. It’s also very easy to figure out what’s going on and what’s ultimately going to happen, so the wait for film’s end is all that much more annoying.
Okay, so maybe this less than glowing review is partly my own fault. I tried watching this movie whilst in the middle of a pyrotechnic migraine, and the constant shrieking and screaming of the cast was like a scalpel in my frontal lobe. The acting too was painfully awful: I think Stephen Hawking could have emoted tent times better than this stiff, wooden cast, all of whom react to their highly melodramatic situations with glazed looks and deadpan line deliveries. “Oh. No. Please. Don’t. Kill. Me.”
Ultimately, Things You Don’t Tell was the cinematic equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard. Not even my Imitrex prescription could make this bearable.
