Single White Female (1992)

We've all had bad roommates. It's a part of growing up in the modern world – trying to find a place to live, coming up short on cash and having to move in with some psychopath who starts to imitate your every move.

Wait, what?

Director: Barbet Schroeder

Starring: Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Jason Leigh

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Yes, this is one of those 1990s films which has since become a sort of punchline - “don't go Single White Female on me,” cries many a half-joking roommate, crossing their fingers and hoping they don't end up on the front page of the newspaper as the victim in a crime story. But back in 1992, it was just a movie. A weird, weird fucking movie.

The film begins with a woman named Allison (Bridget Fonda), in bed with her husband when her husband's ex-wife conveniently calls and leaves a message saying the two slept together. Wow. That's awfully contrived that she called RIGHT FUCKING NOW, like some silly stage play, isn't it? The husband feebly tries to save face, but really, it's all over. There is nothing to do anymore, and the relationship is dead in the water. Now, it's just time for crying alone on a bed:

"This is even worse than the time I was in Lake Placid!"

She goes through a bunch of potential roommates, most of whom are a little bit weird and say bizarre things, so they're all obviously terrible and not even worth considering. Like this girl:

Yes, it looks hopeless. Who will she ever find as a roommate? Who will spare her from these awful cretins who deserve to die?

But all is not lost – eventually, as she's sitting there crying in the kitchen, a random girl walks in without being invited, which doesn't raise any alarm bells for some reason. The girl, introducing herself as Hedy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), offers to make her tea, but when they try to turn on the sink, it showers them with water.

I wonder how they'll bond when the toilet gets clogged.

Let's recap that: She was crying in the corner, Hedy broke in without even knocking or anything, and the sink exploded on them. Seems like a match made in heaven to me!

So they're pretty much instant BFFs, trying on clothes together and they even get a dog, which they take pictures with and even sleep in the same bed with. It's all pretty candy coated.

I can feel my teeth rotting just watching these scenes!

And hell, Allison even promises Hedy that she'll never get back together with her old husband. Weeeeeellllllllll....

She's basically a big liar!

Yup, they get back together almost instantly, without any scenes of them talking or anything. I guess that's a blessing though, as the film is already close to two fucking hours long. Which honestly begs the question – why did they break up at all? Why not just make a film about a younger couple who weren't living together and the girl got a new roommate? Why have the breakup/marriage plot at all? I guess they really needed the extra 10 minutes tacked onto this already overlong film.

Anyway, Hedra doesn't take their getting back together well – there are even a couple of scenes where she sits around eating and watching TV! The horror!

You would think after The Hitcher, she would be able to take this a little bit better. But I guess not.

At least she has the dog, though – oh, wait, no she doesn't. The dog starts ignoring her too.

I guess the dog is just able to tell which person it should pay attention to because the movie's plot needs to move forward.

Which doesn't make any sense, because Hedy's the one who has been actually paying attention to and feeding the dog! Allison has mostly been ignoring it or not there. But in this movie's world, it wants Allison only, even though she never seems to do anything with it, over Hedy who does everything for it and is always there. But Hedy doesn't take THIS injustice lying down... she retaliates by throwing the dog out a window.

Ha! Take THAT, you dumb dog!!!

If seeing a dog die makes you uncomfortable, just pretend the dog was an advocate for the anti-vaccine movement.

My favorite part of this is how Allison believes the bullshit story Hedy feeds her - the dog jumped out of the window of its own volition. Like yeah, that's something a dog would just do at random, because dogs have no sense or intelligence at all and are just helpless dumb animals who commit suicide at any given moment. Does this movie understand dogs at all? Well, a better question would be, does the movie understand anything? I don't think it really does.

Things get even stranger, though, when Hedy gets a makeover and dyes her hair to look exactly like Allison. This is all extremely weird, but does Allison take any action about it beyond being a little annoyed? Nope! It's just kinda weird, is all. I dunno, if my best friend showed up wearing the same clothes as me with the same hairstyle, I'd stop being friends with them.

I guess Allison does start to get worried about her though, after she finds a box under Hedy's bed containing a bunch of letters and stuff that prove she was lying about her past. Allison confides in her best friend, a gay guy upstairs, who tells her they should definitely call a therapist and get her institutionalized. That seems like the obvious thing to do, but then, I live in real life, and not a strange fantasy land like these characters.

But Hedy takes care of him well enough, so whatever, you know?

If a scene where Hedy sleeps with Allison's husband while pretending to be her sounds like a fucking Dr. Phil episode, well, I wouldn't blame you for thinking so. But I'll give the movie one concession – most Dr. Phil episodes don't end with the woman killing the man with a high heel to the head. Though, that would give me more incentive to watch fucking Dr. Phil.

Not all deaths are equal. Some deaths are cool, like dying valiantly saving a friend from an assassin's bullet. Other deaths are not cool, and this is one of those.

So Allison finds out Hedy killed her husband, and that immediately flips Hedy's evil switch. Like, boom, it's fucking instant – she's suddenly just Saturday-morning-cartoon-character evil. Now, she holds Allison hostage at gunpoint, forcing her to buy plane tickets so they can escape. Hedy leaves for a while and Allison, tied to a chair, tries to escape by turning up the volume on the TV to try and get someone's attention to come save her. Which is exactly the way my father survived his own kidnapping in 1993, so I have an emotional attachment to this scene.

Hedy gets back and is about to finally kill Allison, when Allison decides to kiss her on the mouth, which stops Hedy from doing anything. The least they could have done at this point was add in some hot lesbian action, but no, all they do is kiss and then she rests her head on Allison's lap.

This is just her favorite kind of foreplay.

Well, that's one way to stop from getting killed. Though I doubt it would work in every situation...like, a fucking Mafia hitman probably wouldn't be swayed by that.

So let's run down a checklist of what this movie considers mentally ill people to be: they're super clingy and can turn into serial killers at the drop of a hat for almost no reason. Just remember, people with mental health problems: this could be you! Make sure to feel completely ashamed and feel awful about yourself. This movie's got you figured out.

Oh, and the gay best friend guy survived. How? Did he just hide out in his house pretending to be dead for several days? Why not go to the cops and tell them what's happening? Maybe he's just attracted to the fucking danger of all of it. He does give it his best shot at beating Hedy up, but he can't even do that right, as this isn't the real climax!

You get a B minus for effort though.

The real climax involves Allison escaping and running around in the basement air vents like a fucking Die Hard action scene – I'll give the movie a few points for that, as I honestly didn't think THAT would be in the movie. But mostly that's because it's a complete non-sequitur with where the movie was going.

She's like the John McClane of privileged white girls in NYC.

Eventually, though, all things must come to an end, via a stab in the back:

Et tu, roommate I kidnapped?

What did we learn from this movie? Mental health problems means you're crazy and have always been crazy. There's no hope for you, and you'll probably die by being stabbed in the back.

Seriously, this is a pretty silly flick. It's not that good, with little character or story development – it's all strictly shallow and surface-level stuff, existing only as an excuse for the cheap thrills. To be fair though, the thrills can be kinda fun in a dumb way, and the movie was never outright bad. Jennifer Jason Leigh's acting is actually really good, and the other actors aren't bad either.

Talking about it afterwards, Michelle and I both concluded that this was a product of its time, a relic that seems dated now, but also kind of innocent in a way. Like, they didn't know any better. This was made in a time when the world didn't have the Internet giving everyone a voice, including people with mental health problems who would have said 'hey, this is insensitive as fuck.' The people making the movie were living in a much simpler world, without the societal context to know what they were doing was inaccurate and silly. They just wanted to make a scary, fun movie.

It really is interesting in that way, to watch Single White Female in the context of today's super aware world. Social media did a wonderful thing by allowing minority voices to come out and express their feelings and make the complexities of life more visible – that way, they're not as confusing, and the average person can understand the plight of the mentally ill better now without, you know, having to go to school and learn that shit in books and stuff.

But hey, at least we make great and insightful movies now, that only show mental illness in realistic ways!

... On second thought, I'll show myself out.

Images copyright of their original owners. We own none of them.

REVIEW: Lake Placid (1999)

You know what’s great about summertime? The sun is out. The beaches look tempting enough to skip school and work for. The girls all wear less clothes. You sweat like a fountain. And sometimes…you get eaten by giant killer crocodiles inexplicably residing in lakes owned by crazy old women. Wait, what?

Director: Steve Miner

Starring: Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Brandon Gleeson

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139414/

"What, are we all museum bigots here in Maine?"

-Bridget Fonda

Yes, Lake Placid, that classic movie about stupid people getting slaughtered by a big crocodile. With a semi-well-known cast of B-grade actors and also Betty White, this movie got some press back in the day and was a pretty big hit in theaters, despite getting mostly shit from the critics. But is this big, dumb monster movie stupid or…really stupid? Let’s take a look.

The film starts off quietly, serenely on a lake with some guys fishing. Nothing wrong here, right? Well, only if you don’t think a guy’s legs getting bitten off by a crocodile underwater is a big deal. In which case, everything’s peachy.

He could still be OK.

So yeah, this bloody spectacle gets the attention of some scientist organization all the way in New York when an ancient looking tooth is found in the remains of the diver. So…what, the monster is losing its baby teeth? Or was that diver really so rock-hard that the tooth just fell out of his mouth like that? Yeah, it’s stupid, but then, we’ve got bigger things to worry about. Like our leading bitch played by Bridget Fonda, who is not a conniving, murder-friendly wife this time but instead something even worse: an insecure scientist who does nothing but complain, complain, COMPLAIN. About EVERYTHING! I can sort of understand why she’s pissed off, as the guy she’s having an affair with wanted to see some other bimbo, but god, the way she’s carrying on it’s like she’s a toddler with a soiled diaper.

I’m serious. Look at the scenes after she gets to Maine; it continues there too. Some cops say some stuff about how she works for a museum and she gets all defensive. They want her to go out on a boat with them and it’s like they told her she had to be a slave and work in the Sahara Desert pushing giant stone rocks for a year. God, it’s like she’s…no, I won’t say ‘on her period,’ because that’s an insult to women everywhere. This…is something entirely new. I believe we have discovered a hypersensitive breed of woman entirely removed from the normal one. We will call them the LEGION OF SUPER-BITCHES.

So, uh, yeah, she meets Brandon Gleeson, who plays the town sheriff, and Bill Pullman, who plays a random rugged male well equipped to fight a monster in a B-horror movie, and together they form a power trio of annoyance as they go out on the lake and listen to Fonda bitch some more. God, she even bitches about the tents they have to sleep in. There’s one scene where she slaps Gleeson in the face like twice for accidentally getting her wet or something. Slaps him in the face. UGH. Why can’t the crocodile kill her first? In what cruel world does this lady have to be the main character?

Alright, alright, so then they’re introduced to the one good thing about this movie – and it’s a major plus – Betty White as Delores, this batshit crazy old lady who lives by the lake and raises farm animals. She says she killed her husband when he was suffering from a terminal illness. The movie…just kind of throws this at us and then the scene ends. So…OK then.

Then we’re introduced to more diabetes fuel when we see our next character, Hector, played by Oliver Platt. This guy is apparently a rich crocodile hunter, or something, who likes to swim with them rather then…actually hunt them. Apparently, according to Fonda, he thinks they’re godly creatures because they’ve never bitten him specifically. Well, have you ever considered the fact that they don’t bite you because they smell the toxic annoyance running through your blood like poison? Might be a factor. And godly creatures? Well I guess if you can claim Jedi as a religion these days, claiming that crocodiles are godly creatures isn’t so ridiculous after all.

So they all form a big old group of crocodile hunters, which is confusing to me, as I have no idea why so many people are jumping at the chance to go to this backwater Maine lake just for the possibility of maybe finding something legendary and unique literally right after it happens, like they have NOTHING ELSE they could be doing, but then, hey, I guess I’m just too dumb to understand the complex inner workings of a group that lets Bridget Fonda hang out with them. Must be something in the water – oh wait, it is. It’s something in the water literally comes out in the blink of an eye while nobody is looking and bites off a guy’s head.

Wait, what? Rewind that. Let’s watch that again.

OK, so Fonda falls off the boat because she’s a clumsy idiot, and they have to go save her. Then they go pick up Platt too, and when everyone is finally on board…wham! No more head for random disposable deputy. What the hell? How could a giant crocodile get THAT FUCKING CLOSE and not be heard or seen? How…why…who…HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE? Did they all suffer a simultaneous spell of deafness and blindness? Does the crocodile just have a homing beacon so he could aim precisely for that guy’s head and slip back into the water before anyone could do anything about it? Or – wait, I got it; I really got it. Maybe the crocodile is actually a ninja. NINJA CROC! That sounds like a Newgrounds game from the early 2000s.

So, in other news, Brandon Gleeson is depressed that one of his deputies got eaten by the crocodile, although really I think he’s just pining for the Harry Potter movies to come and revive his career. Platt tries to comfort him by telling him a story about a dream he had as a kid about his head being separated from his body and used as a soccer ball by the neighborhood bullies, which is, I guess, supposed to comfort Gleeson for his loss…I got nothing there; that one’s too weird even for me to touch. Let’s just skip to the next scene.

Gleeson doesn’t take comfort to this (surprised?), but then he gets caught in one of Platt’s traps, which does not make him any happier of a man. This results in Gleeson chasing Platt around like Elmer Fudd chasing Buggs Bunny. It’s completely stupid and makes it even harder to take this movie seriously, but what happens next is a testament to everything wonderful in this world. I warn you, viewers – prepare for this scene, or else you might end up unable to handle how ungodly awesome it truly is. This, folks…this is what is good in life.

I am of course talking about a scene where a bear fights a crocodile. THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING.

You are looking at the crowning moment of AWESOME in this entire film.

So Bill Pullman, frustrated with the fact that he hasn’t done anything in this movie yet despite getting top billing, jumps in and saves Bridget Fonda as the crocodile drags the bear off into the water for some, uh, lunchtime. Then the movie decides that all the sudden, Fonda and Pullman like one another romantically as she fixes the wounds he got from a hard day’s croc-fighting. Where did this come from? I don’t know; I guess anyone who isn’t a crazy psychotic killing roommate is an upgrade for her. Or maybe she just fell for the old Lone Starr charm.

Works every time on any lady!

Speaking of which, Bridget Fonda’s acting here is just horrible. She constantly pauses between lines, and while doing that she changes her facial expression at MINIMUM five times before her next line. Did the director just have an incredible tendency for mood swings? Was he bipolar? “No, uh, Bridget, try an angry face now. No, that won’t work. How about a sad, confused face? No…”

While that awkwardly forced romance is going on, Brandon Gleeson finds out that Betty White lied before about her husband and has been working in cohorts all along with the crocodiles that ate him for the last 6 years. Yes, folks. You are now looking at the world’s first and last old lady-slash-crocodile cohort team. TREMBLE IN FEAR! But seriously, what sense does this make? The old lady is working with the crocodiles that killed her husband? Why? Next you’ll be telling me it was all a conspiracy the whole time to kill him together! I smell a Hitchcockian mystery-thriller! Call David Fincher!

Happy birthday Mr. Croc! Here's your present!

So, yeah, they place her under house arrest after seeing her feed a cow to the crocodile. Because animal rights need to be preserved! Betty White, in an amusing twist, starts calling them all names as they put her on lockdown. I don’t know about you, but I think “Officer Fuckmeat” is a very poetic way to express one’s feelings. Touching.

Meanwhile, Platt and his new cop girlfriend go on a helicopter ride while Platt tries to find the crocodile. He gets in too far over his head and the crocodile tries to eat their helicopter:

"Yum, a snack! I love helicopters, even when they're storebought and not mother's homemade kind..."

Then we get our climax, as everyone decides they have to kill these crocs before anyone else gets hurt. I love how even though Gleeson and the others gave Betty White all that crap about animal rights and mistreating her cows by feeding them to the croc, they have ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM with using one of the cows as bait to lure it out in the open. You hypocrites, that’s like if Richard Nixon went on tirades about how people shouldn’t steal. You goddamned hypocrites.

But anyway, Platt and Fonda both think they should SAVE the poor defenseless creatures. Well gee, why didn’t I think of that? It’s not like the croc actually killed anybody…oh, wait, it did and you’re both idiots. Why doesn’t that surprise me in the least? So they run around and Fonda falls off the truck they’re on – seriously, can’t this broad quit falling off shit for one second so she doesn’t have to be rescued? – and the croc chases her into the water, where she evades him by…hiding behind a tree. Yeah, because there’s NO WAY a crocodile would EVER think to look there! You might as well put up a fake wall with a tunnel drawn on it and see if he goes through it.

But, surprise, the croc finds her and chases her until it gets caught in the broken down helicopter like some fatal neck-brace. The animal rights pussies complain, so Pullman just shoots it with a dart gun and puts it to sleep, but then OH NO, there was actually TWO crocodiles this whole time! Gleeson immediately blows it up with a rocket launcher and…nobody complains even one bit about that. Huh. Those fuckin’ double standards, right? Gotta love ‘em.

This movie is stupid. Really stupid, in fact! Bridget Fonda is a pain in the ass, most of the characters are morons, the plot is full of holes and the only thing even close to redeeming any of this is Betty White as the old lady. They should have just made this whole movie about her! Maybe then it would have been at least a little more entertaining. As is, the only thing this movie is good for is taking it to Gatorland to use as food for the gators. And that’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!

Pictures copyright of their original owners, although I took all the snapshots from the actual movie.