Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Messages Deleted Movie Review 81




This movie is a Canadian thriller starring Matthew Lillard(pictured below). Those of you who might not have heard of him, he was one of the two killers in the first Scream movie. It is directed by a guy called Rob Cowan.

Lillard plays a failed screenwriter called Joel Brandt who teaches classes in screenwriting at a college.He gets on well with a girl in his class called Millie(Gina Holden). She is an aspiring writer and she talks to him about her work. He seems an eccentric guy and he has his own way of doing things. His girlfriend is Claire(Chiara Zanni) and she is an aspiring actress. Joel gets a message left on his answering machine from someone he doesn't know saying that he needs to come to a certain address of that person will die. He thinks that it is a prank from his friend, Adam(Michael Eklund).He finds out that it was not Adam.

He wonders what is going on when he receives more of these calls. He goes to the addresses but he is too late. The cops are on the scene and Detective Lavery(Deborah Kara Unger) talks to Joel about what happened and he tells her about his calls. She wonders if he is the one committing the crimes.. Joel is surprised that they don't believe his story. He has deleted the messages so there is no proof. Detective Lavery has his as the number one suspect for the murders and the cops begin to follow him around much to his annoyance. He keeps getting the calls and he keeps turning up too late. As more bodies are found, he looks guiltier by the minute. He finds out that the killings are very similar to a screenplay that he had written years ago. He begins to think that he is being framed for these murders. It is discovered that he has stolen the idea for his screenplay from a former student and he realises that this person is after him.

He tries to find the person whose name is written on the screenplay,but he can't. Meanwhile, the police catch him at another crime scene and they hunt him all over the city. His girlfriend is killed by the psycho and he is accused of that too. He gets help from Millie(pictured above) and he stays with her while the cops are looking for him. He sends Millie off with Adam for her own safety. He begins to wonder if Adam is the killer and he races after them. He calls the cops to tell them about Adam.The cops follow him and Joel ends up at a house where Adam and Millie went. Adam stumbles out and Joel shoots him, thinking that he is the killer. He soon finds out that it is not Adam but Millie who is the killer. It turns out that the screenplay was hers and that he stole her idea or something like that and she wants revenge. He tries to kill her, but he fails at first. Detective Lavery turns up and he tries to warn her about Millie but she won't listen and the detective gets killed. Joel shoots her with a bow and arrow and she dies. We cut to the end and Matthew is in prison and he has finally got his bestselling screenplay......

This movie was not bad at all. I wasn't sure about it at first, but I enjoyed it after a while. The story was interesting and there were a lot of red herrings in this. I would recommend it. It gets a 6/10.

10 comments:

  1. I haven't seen this movie. Anyways thank you for review. I hope i will watch this movie very soon.

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  2. why did he end up in the prison anyway? Does that mean he committed the murders and Milley was just a character he created?

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  3. Well, the ending seems to be that Joel kills his buddy and that Millie was killed too. It seems as if Joel goes to prison for killing his friend and he is doing very well out of it...That is my view of it, but you never know with some of these movies. They are deliberately confusing, i think....

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  4. I think it meet that he wrote a screen plash about murders he commited

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  5. I think it meet that he wrote a screen plash about murders he commited

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  6. Ok so did he go to prison for being the sole survivor of all that and then write a screenplay based on it? Or what? It didn't make it clear... And wikipedia or imdb does not explain either...

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  7. First of all....I didn't get that at all. If we are basing the movie on any type of facts of this society he would not be allowed to write a movie based on mirdersbhe was involved in especially if he was the sole survivor and changed the characters names. So please someone who knows or has a good idea please post it.

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  8. I literally just got done watching this film, never heard of it or seen it before (Mathew Lillard fan). I wanted to know what the ending meant but it's no where to be found on the internet. After reflecting on this film I think: 1) he took the fall for all the murders due to the incriminating evidence against him and both of the detectives died who could corroborate his story. 2) he's crazy(dissociative identity disorder) and wrote a screen play based on murders he committed.

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  9. I think that the final scene could be taken in two different ways. The first possibility is that Brandt is in prison because all of the evidence pointed to him being the serial killer and nobody else who would be able to tell the real story could because everyone else died. The other possibility is that he had been in jail the whole time because he actually did commit the murders and then wrote a screenplay about it with Millie being the serial killer and with himself as the protagonist. The second possibility came to my friend because of how the idea that the protagonist is just as good as the villain was a theme that was used throughout the movie. In a way, this could be taken to mean that the protagonist and the villain could be seen as just mirror images of each other, with one being good and the other being evil.

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  10. SOOOO MATTHEW BABYGIRL LOOKED SO FINE HERE AS ALWAYS SLAY BIG SLAY LOVED IT 10/10

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