Kristy Swanson used to be a looker, that’s for sure. But in her latest film, the passably stitched together if somewhat dubiously plotted psychological horror picture Living Death, she’s shot tightly to frame her in the most flattering light. The contours of the face and upper arms don’t frequently lie, though. It’s one of the things your mind occasionally wanders to during the movie, which otherwise trots through obligatory paces in its story of a philandering, vindictive wife and her psychotic, unhinged husband.

The story centers around Victor Harris (Greg Bryk), a twisted, trust-fund millionaire who’s used to getting what he wants — both in matters of finance and kinky sex. When we first meet him, he’s busy cheating on wife Elizabeth (Swanson) by putting the moves on a random skeezer and taking her… to his meticulously gloomy attic torture chamber. Her resultant crippling injury is settled by Victor’s dutiful lawyer Roman Arbogast (Josh Peace), who’s also carrying on an affair with Elizabeth. Together the two hatch a plan to knock Victor off, using an allegedly undetectable drug that paralyzes him. When Victor comes to in the morgue, however, and suffers a bunch of medical students poking at him, he’s understandably pissed off, and sets off on a campaign of brutal revenge.

That all of this leads to a climactic showdown in which Victor and Roman square off against one another, with Elizabeth rushing into the breach to get her piece of the action, is certainly fated, and not necessarily amazingly rendered in Leo Scherman’s story. But director Erin Berry works up a few good effects shots (arms being ripped from a torso, for instance), and smartly keeps his cast all on the same page regarding the tone of the material. (The medical students are especially funny, and nicely given a small bit of some fleshed-out dimensionality.) There’s nothing really too special here — this is your typical calling card-type film for the below-the-line and behind-the-scenes folks, and a quick payday for actors you mostly haven’t heard of — and the gore factor isn’t high enough for genre diehards, but for fans of Raising Cain who are irked that film never spawned a direct-to-video franchise, this one’s for you.

The film is presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, with an accompanying English language 5.1 Dolby digital soundtrack. Nicely, there’s a 21-minute making-of featurette, which includes jokey, good-natured, on-set interviews with the principal cast and a bit of behind-the-scenes material. The first seven minutes, though, consist of director Berry, who talks about the movie’s rootedness in real-life, and how the original script wasn’t as much of a revenge picture, but rather had a more sympathetic version of Victor. Berry then half-jokes that the character was reworked to incorporate more of his own personality traits, and to make him “a complete asswipe.” This segment is compelling in its differentiation from most stuffy interviews with would-be auteurs; Berry comes off as a bit smarmy, and not particularly erudite, but kind of funny and endearing nonetheless. C (Movie) B- (Disc)

The Simple Life
launched in 2003, back when Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie were only
demi-celebrities, it was pitched with the tagline of, “They’re rich, they’re sexy
— they’re totally out of control.” The gist of the show, at least at its point
of initial conception and mass marketing, had less to do with celebration of one
(or two, depending on your scorecard) trollop’s obliviousness and excess, and
more with exploring the supposition, however tongue in cheek or slyly, that the
preposterously affluent were still faced with their own sets of problems. In pulling
these two down from the penthouse to the sidewalk, this was to be cast in stark
relief, and everyone could laugh along together and maybe even feel a bit
uplifted.

Distressingly, I’m not sure many people in the series’ target
audience picked up on the joke. Whatever the status — today, this fleeting
moment — of Hilton and Richie’s smile-for-the-cameras! friendship, they’ve
peeled off three small screen re-ups of the show, as well as all manner of
endorsement deals, pop albums, perfume scents, etcetera. They’re also both…
authors. Sigh.

What began as a goof has seemingly fed into if not outright inspired
a whole generation of tweens sporting low-rise sweatpants with “Juicy” emblazoned
on their asses, and women carrying around little frou-frou dogs in custom-made
purses. It needs to stop, as the fourth season DVD release of the series
confirms.

I’m certainly not above some good, old-fashioned, low-class
fun. Newlyweds was a dryly brilliant comedy,
and the recent re-up of VH-1’s Flavor of
Love was similarly inspired. (No, seriously.) Hilton and Richie’s act,
though, has run its course. After the third season’s “interning” bent (sans
berets and Lewinsky reenactments, alas), The
Simple Life 4 finds their “feud” spilling over the carefully groomed plastic
hedges of this thinly sketched concept, already stretched perilously thin.

The first episode opens at a coffee shop, where Hilton and
Richie exchange wan bitchery. Then, over the course of the next nine shows, the
pair whine, kvetch and fumble their way through assigned domestic duties in the
SoCal suburbs, naturally leaving disasters and unfinished tasks in their wake. Whereas
Jessica Simpson’s idiocy on Newlyweds
was at least somewhat endearing insofar as you can tell she’s definitely not in
on the joke, Hilton’s shenanigans too frequently come off as blithely cruel-hearted
— those of someone, well, spoiled and un-thoughtful. If Richie is less grating and deplorable, that’s hardly an accomplishment of the highest order. That the show doesn’t
incorporate cathartic and lasting, consequential comeuppance for in particular
Hilton is to its irredeemable detriment. Can we, as a society, make a collective New Year’s to start ignoring both these lasses?

All 10 episodes of The
Simple Life are presented in 1.33:1 full screen, spread across two discs,
and retailing for around $19.98. An English language Dolby 2.0 surround sound
audio track anchors the release aurally, and there are (unfortunately? blissfully?)
no supplemental special features. D (Series) C- (Disc)