The Gardener (1998)

Lack of good storyline.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Although I'm sorry to have seen this film in the first place, my wife came home with it, she loves Richard Grieco. Yeah, he's good looking. So am I.Anyway, we've seen this almost funny piece of experiment that could have been a film if it was better written and especially filmed! It was too dark! I hate dark films. I've spend more then 500$ on my Philips television, it's a very good one so it had to be the film. That was my first and worst frustration.But it was also too obvious. And at the end, ... leave that stupid plastic on Kelly's naked body: come on! When you're running for your life, you don't care if you're bare naked!!! (I wouldn't)Stupid film, and I'm kind of ashamed to have watched it.

Spoilers herein.(Cat's eye comments follow.*)This is a remarkably intelligent idea, worthy of Peter Greenaway as it combines sex, death, eating and counting. It is about the eternal bond between excrement and beauty. The Greenaway approach would come at it from the side of beauty. This takes an apposite, opposite approach. The film takes beauty (flowers, the statuesque Ms Everhart), kills it and turns it into a vile product. Presumably, the intent is to trigger the viewer into creating their own internal garden in the life we have outside this film.Thus, an intelligent film viewer will see this as a matter of art, deliberately bad. The clue is Ms Everhart's subsequent involvement in a Dogma film, and McDowell's past role with the master of visual indirection, Kubrick. The notion is that beauty must pass through the digestive system, a notion treated here with exaggerated sexual connotations. Everhart is a famed companion of Hollywood stars, and already at 30 is an icon of this process, something of deliberate focus in `Jade.'*Cat's eye comments result when nothing intelligent can be directly said of a film.

This is unmistakably the worst movie I have ever had to endure watching. This movie was bad all around. The director clearly thinks that a moving camera is what makes a film great. Unfortunately the constant moving only helps the existing nausea. The DP was real bad, no other way to put it. "Day for night" shots were poorly matched to day shots and so on. I don't know what that other person was talking about regarding Angie Everheart. She is a terribly bad, bad, actor. It's no suprise this movie has no distribution after a whole year. If I were a distributer I would run as far away from this "film" as possible!

What starts off as an unfunny LITTLE SHOPPE OF HORRORS retread eventually implodes into an unintentionally funny HOUSE OF WAX regurgitation with McDowell instead of Vincent Price and Everhart in lieu of Phyllis Kirk. In fact the only notable ingredient in this unremarkable formula pic is Everhart's evolution to budding Action Star in its earliest sequences! Shorn of the long red hair that is her trademark, she delivers more genuine strength than Sharon Stone does in her unwatchable rehash of GLORIA; she singlehandedly projects more serious intensity than the starlets in either of the two NIKITA remakes (POINT OF NO RETURN and that toothless teleseries); and she takes one giant leap toward establishing herself as a formidable Star when she finally makes the transition into studio Action Movies. Check it out under its current title SILENT SCREAMS to watch the progress of a future MovieStar in Everhart -- otherwise get the weed whacker.