100 Feet: Review By Fallenlords

Marnie Watson (Famke Janssen) is released from prison but has to serve the rest of her sentence under house arrest. This is the same house in which she killed, in self defence, her Police Officer husband Mike Watson (Michael Paré) .

Needless to say she is not flavour of the month with Mike's old partner Shanks (Bobby Cannavale). Marnie has to wear an electronic ankle bracelet and stay within 100 feet of the base station located on the upper floor. This starts to prove a wee bit of a problem, when she find that the house is possessed with the vengeful spirit of her late husband.

Plot wise this movie falls a little bit flat. Another Horror/Thriller again it suffers from the same problems as 'Mirrors' I reviewed the other day. It might have been better being one or the other. Overall Mirrors is by far the better film because it has the better story. There is no explanation to all the events that occur in this film. Shanks seems to take a very strange interest in Marnie. Even to the point of parking outside her house and watching her day and night. But there is no real reason for this, he has a hunch that perhaps Marnie didn't kill Mike. What gets me with this subplot of Marnie and Shanks is there are things that could have tied the story together to make more sense. What Marnie discovers in the house for example, would be motive enough for Shanks. Ultimately this is nothing more than what it is, which is a little bit of a disappointment.

The acting overall was fine, I quite like Famke Janssen and she played this part well. Although I thought she was very calm considering the circ*mstances. Personally I would have been sitting in a corner quivering, but there you go. There are not many players in this overall, it focuses on the main characters. Famke did a good job I thought to keep you interested, to me when an actor has to go one on one with the camera I think it shows them for what they are - faults and all. The actor has to hold your attention, Famke did a good job to my mind.

Directed by Eric Red, who personally I knew little about. When I checked it appears he has done other films, things like Cohen and Tate, and has quite a few writing credits such as the Hitcher and Near Dark. All films I quite enjoyed, but he seems to turn out a small volume of films which might be one of the reasons he has never registered before. To be fair the direction on this film is fine, but considering he is also the writer then I would have to pull him up on lack of plot.

There are some nice well done scenes in this film, a few jump type moments but nothing really scary. There is one quite horrific scene in the bedroom when the ghost of Mike takes a dislike to Marnie's new beau. The effects were done well, though a little bit over dramatic at the end.

One of the issues with this film is the setting. Because Marnie is isolated to the 100 feet, that is pretty much all we see through the whole of the film. But to my mind they didn't make it claustrophobic enough. Fair enough being in a considerably large house by itself is not going to feel that closed in, but add a vengeful ghost and you would think that the walls would start to close in very quickly.

This is a Horror/Thriller but I would say leans more to the Horror genre than Thriller. But for me it wasn't that frightening. There is no real Thriller aspect to this at all, when I tried to spin a few theories they all turned out to be useless even though they perhaps made more sense than the eventual ending. So once again when the middle road is taken, you are not totally sure how to view films like this because they hope to appease a joint audience. Again this film could of gone either way, it could of been full on Horror in which case they had all the effects to do it. Or it could of gone more down the Thriller route, and there were enough plot lines running through to create a decent Thriller.

All in all it was an enjoyable film that held my interest, but left me asking more questions than it answered. Which in itself was a bit of a shame because it could of been more than it was.