Park Evil (2005)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Absolutely the worst movie.

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Smug hot shot yuppie Tom Weaver (a solid performance by Grayson McCouch) sneaks into his office late at night so he can embezzle $10 million dollars from the company he works for. Tom becomes trapped in the office parking garage and gets relentlessly terrorized by a vicious lunatic in a big, grimy, ugly black souped-up truck. Director/co-writer James Seale maintains a constant brisk pace throughout, ably creates plenty of sweaty, nerve-rattling, claustrophobic tension, and stages the copious vehicular carnage with considerable muscular aplomb. Moreover, the central plot has pleasing echoes of "Duel" (a Dennis Weaver lookalike even appears in a quick witty cameo) and the maniac's true identity is genuinely surprising. Popping up in nifty supporting parts are Adrian Paul as Tom's slimy, unscrupulous business partner Gavin Matheson, the lovely Amy Locane as Tom's fed-up wife Molly, Michelle Beisner as Tom's hottie mistress Rebecca, and Dan Mundell as amiable security guard Eddie. Richard Lerner's slick, shadowy cinematography and Neal Acree's stirring'n'spooky score are likewise fine and effective. A satisfying little action thriller.

This one might be too high concept for its own good. It's part high-tech heist film--or to make that appropriately lighter, the end of Office Space (1999), part adulterous thriller, part slasher/stalker, and part Duel (1971), Christine (1983), Maximum Overdrive (1986)/Trucks (1997), Joy Ride (2001) and Black Cadillac (2003), almost all set in a parking garage to save money.As inherently silly as that mixture might be, it could work if written, directed and acted carefully enough. With the exception of Dan Mundell as Eddie, who is delightfully campy and over the top--he almost reminded me of Don Knotts as a bizarre Barney Fife, the performances in Throttle are nothing to write home about, but they're good enough. And director James Seale has the mechanics of basic thriller and slasher/stalker scenes down pat. Those two facets make this film almost work. Almost.What kills it is the script. Unfortunately, Seale was also one of the writers, along with Neil Elman, but the principal cast is also partly to blame, because they should have caught the problems with the script at various stages of making the film. For example, we're shown that the lead character, Tom Weaver (Grayson McCouch) is trapped in an office building's parking garage. His car has been disabled. But this is a parking garage that people are still using, meaning that they're driving their cars out of it--we see people leaving their offices and getting in their cars to go home, and there are one or two security guards on duty. For most of the film, you keep asking yourself, "Okay, why doesn't he just walk down the ramps and out of the garage? How stupid is this guy?" He actually begs people to give him a ride out of the garage, but it never hits him to just simply walk the path that cars would take.Well, it turns out that there's not only a security "turnpike" bar in the garage, but also a gate that can be closed and not driven through. Also, there's a reason that the security guards might not open or be able to open the gate. But we're not shown either of these facts until almost the end of film--and they wouldn't make much sense until then. But that's bad writing, because we need a reason that Tom can't or wouldn't try to just walk out of the garage right away, near the beginning of the film . . . at least if we're not to conclude that he must have been lobotomized. Additionally, there's a red herring character that got into the garage somehow, so that somewhat negates the reasons that Tom couldn't have just walked out.This kind of writing plagues the whole film. Another example--a truck is chasing Tom through the garage, trying to run him over, and he frequently just stands in the way, even though the garage is filled with obstacles that a vehicle couldn't easily go around (or through), like other cars and concrete pillars. Tom keeps making inane decisions like that, even at the very end of the film, but I don't want to detail them all. Besides I don't have room. Detailing them all would take many thousands of words. Suffice it to say that Seale and Elman have given us maybe the dumbest protagonist ever.So aside from enjoying scenes where Seale gets his directorial mechanics right--things work often enough on the "trees" level despite the protagonist's inanity (and heck, some people just are stupid and why can't we show them in films?), and aside from enjoying a creative way to keep the budget way down--at least this isn't another "people running through the woods" film, any enjoyment you get out of Throttle is likely to see just how stupid and ridiculous it can get, and it does tend to keep topping itself in that department. Because of this, it may be worth seeing for fans of "so bad it's good" films, but everyone else should avoid it.

I saw this movie the other day, I wasn't expecting too much because I had not heard anything about the movie up to now.If you've watched a few made for TV movies done by the stations like HBO and the Sci-Fi channel, this runs along those lines as far as quality.The storyline is simple; A deal has gone bad and the main character needs to escape this underground parking garage while someone is trying to kill him. It's how the story is executed that is done well. The director managed to keep the edge-of-your-seat suspense going throughout the entire film and you keep finding yourself trying to figure out who exactly the mysterious attacker is. One minute you think it's one guy, the next another. I wasn't able to figure it out until they showed who it was.Pleasantly surprised by this movie, definitely worth the money I spent to see it.

A yuppie (Grayson McCouch) is being chased in a parking garage by a big truck upon making a deal together with his shady and aggressive boss (Adrian Paul) with involvement of fraud. At the same time he is obsessed with a possible adultery committed by his young and beautiful wife (Amy Locane). We have to find out who is trying to kill ,why and couple of other things.To disregard the fact that we have already seen quite many films with similar plot (e.g. "Duel", "Joyride", etc.), this film is failing to deliver what it's prototypes have accomplished. Badly written dialogues and average acting spoil the whole suspense which the film makers are trying to achieve simply by doing the scenes with a truck trying to kill the protagonist. On the other hand, the motives of the villain are quite illogical because while in some scenes he/she is badly trying to kill the hero but fails to dot that due to quickness of the latter, in other scenes he/she has a perfect opportunity to succeed in killing but lets the man go. This cat and mouse game takes place throughout the whole movie and at times it's hard to understand true desire of the villain - whether he/she is trying to kill the man or is just flirting with him.The flashback scenes where we see the relationship of the protagonist with his wife, his boss (Adrian Pole) and his lover (Michele Beisner) are not quite satisfying either. These scenes vaguely concern the main storyline and some of the characters turn out to be irrelevant to the plot. Subplot concerning the adulteries taking place in protagonist's life turns out to be quite meaningless as well, with respect to rest of the film plot. Good thing about the film is that it is pretty hard to spot the villain. I was unable to guess who was in the truck and was quite surprised when I finally got to know that. So, if you want to know who is behind that truck wheel and what is going on in his/her head, just watch this average thriller. After all, it's worth watching once if you have nothing else to watch.