Right at Your Door DVD: Review By Brian Gallagher

A couple of years ago around this time I reviewed reviewed a movie called Waterborne, a pretty damn solid indie flick made on hardly any money about a terrorist attack on Los Angeles that contaminated the city's water supply. Today, umm, around this time, I watched Right at Your Door, a flick maked on hardly any money about a terrorist attack on Los Angeles that contaminated the city's air via dirty bombs strategically placed throughout the L.A. area. For all their similarities, they sure are different because Right at Your Door isn't nearly the flick that Waterborne is.

It's not like they don't try, though, even though Right at Your Door keeps it a lot simpler in terms of cast. There are really only four actors here and a actors where you just hear their voices and a ton of actors where you just see them in hazmat suits. Of those four, only two are pivotal in Rory Cochrane's Brad and Mary McCormack's Lexi, a married couple settling down in Los Angeles. The other two are so minor they're hardly worth mentioning, but one is a guy who is a handyman next door who breaks into the house after the attack because he can't make it to his own home and a little kid who we see for maybe four scenes. That's about it.

It starts out as a normal with Lexi going off to work and Brad staying home as the out-of-work musician husband. Gotta love L.A. Anyway, Brad is brushing his teeth and listening to the radio when he hears about breaking news about a bomb going off in downtown Los Angeles, where his wife works. Within minutes more reports flood in about other bombs going off in other regions of L.A. and panic starts to ensue. After Brad's failed attempt at rescuing Lexi, he encounters his neighbor's handyman Alvaro (Tony Perez) and they start to seal off the house as word had reached through radio that it was a dirty bomb with airborne toxic chemicals... and the cloud was coming right to their door, so to speak. When Lexi finally shows up, covered in toxic dust, the plot indeed thickens.

While writer-director Chris Gorak has conceived a decent story here, it's pretty damn dull in parts as it is clear from the movie (and his interview featurettes) that the film was almost solely focused on the relationship between these two characters. While he draws on the real-life "help is coming" similarities from the Katrina disaster, the story crawls at a tortise's pace, only occasionaly jump-started to move it along faster. The film is onlly 96 minutes, but it does feel a lot longer than that because of the pacing. At the same time, while Rory Cochrane and Mary McCormack deliver solid performances in some parts, like the script itself, they're rather boring in others. It feels like most of the fault lies with Gorak's script though, and when the script tries to establish character development with trivial details about their marriage in the midst of this crisis, it just doesn't really jive well in a movie. It does sound like these sorts of exchanges would be rather authentic, if such an event were to occur, but maybe the writing was just a little too plain in these instances for me to really give a damn.

I will give Gorak credit for a pretty damn slick twist at the end, though. I really didn't see it coming and it really capped off the movie quite nicely. It's just too bad that, while it might not have been too little, it certainly was too late. With such a brilliant twist, it just made me wonder why he couldn't have written so crisply for the first 90 minutes of the movie instead of just the last 6. It's this inconsistency and others that drop this film down to merely average status.

We get just about the right amount of special features here. First up is Forearm Shiver: An Interview With Chris Gorak. Gorak gives us some nice insights into the inception of the idea all the way through production and post-production. We get some good stuff here, but it would've been even better if he weren't such a monotonous dude. We also get why this feature is called Forearm Shiver, and that is because this was the very odd working title. This does go on for a little too long though with little segments on sound design and visual FX (which there aren't too many of) and talking about the festival scene and a lot of other stuff. It runs a little over 25 minutes and I would've been happy with 10 or 15.

Film School Tips on Making an Independent Film With Chris Gorak is next and he talks about how be broke into the biz and the people he worked with while doing various other jobs in art direction or production design such as David Fincher, Steven Speilberg and Terry Gilliam. He then goes on and gives other tips for writing, actors and other aspects of filmmaking. This one is 15 minutes long... and it still feels long. I don't know. Maybe it's just the way he talks.

The last thing we get here are the two Alternate Script Endings, which is funny because Gorak said in the first special feature that no one will ever see them.

The disc is presented in the widescreen format in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio.

The sound can be heard through either the Dolby Digital 5.1 or Dolby Digital 2.0 formats.

I personally think this front cover isn't that great. It features a guy in a hazmat suit with some surprisingly positive critic quotes and a shot of the Hollywood sign in the background. The back has more critic quotes, a brief synopsis, some random pics from the movie, a slick special features/tech spec box and the billing block. The back is designed nicely, but the front just bugs me.

Right at Your Door won't be the best movie I've seen all year and it won't be the worst, even though it easily had the potential to be either one. The film is worth a look-see for this unusual "what-if" situation and fans of Cochrane and McCormack will likely be pleased. It's just annoying that this films see-saws between boredom and brilliance quite often in the runtime.