Films with rampaging dads exercising familial retribution have
enough entries to probably qualify as their own subgenre, both in the basest,
direct-to-video form and in more tricked-out iterations (think The Patriot, for instance). No prurience
or real cathartic release is to be found in Disappeared,
however, starring Ray Winstone.

Written by Simon Tyrrell and directed by Adrian Shergold,
the movie is of said genre, with Winstone (Sexy
Beast, The Proposition)
starring as Harry Sands, a self-made, middle class family man, happily married
with two children. When he learns that his college-age daughter has gone
missing in Istanbul, however, Harry
flies out to find her. To his horror, he discovers from Olivia’s best friend
Manda (Emily Corrie) that the two of them have been working as nightclub
dancers, and not as charity workers as Harry and his wife were led to believe.

So begins Harry’s hunt for his missing daughter, a labyrinthine
journey that leads him to suspect businessmen Peter Vine (David Westhead) and
Metin Fazouk (Dimitri Andreas). Olivia hasn’t been prostituting herself, as the
film goes to painstaking lengths to stress, but Peter, Metin and possibly other
figures seem to have an unhealthy pattern of nursing crushes on girls half
their age. So that leads to… an awful lot of chin-wagging, actually. The police
are sort of helpful, but move too slowly for Harry’s liking; basically everyone
keeps expressing sympathy to Harry, saying, “I have a daughter too.” Winstone
gives a decent performance, but the chief problem is that Disappeared doesn’t make particularly good use of the potentially
intimidating figure that he can cut. He’s a somewhat neutered character, and
the audience keeps waiting for something to interrupt the movie’s solemnly
plotted track. Shergold, too, proves a fairly cut-rate director; he leans
heavily on affected slow-motion, and this tack — along with some quite murky
and shaky handheld camerawork in a few key passages throughout the film’s
second act — certainly don’t help elevate the material.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Disappeared is presented in somewhat grainy 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen,
with English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 stereo audio tracks.
There are no supplemental bonus materials, only a gallery of four preview
trailers, including one for The Breed. The film scores points for not being a completely desultory revenge tale, but it’s not really plausible or gripping enough to recommend to the arthouse set. C (Movie) D+ (Disc)

When America’s
premium gay television network here! (the “queer” and “get used to it” being
implicit) delivered, in the fall of 2005, its first original series to its available
audience base of more than 50 million households, Dante’s Cove instantly became one of the most talked about shows in
the gay community, thanks probably in equal measure to its well-toned cast and
predilection for campiness. The show unashamedly mixed together sex, horror and
elements of the supernatural and gay culture, and then pressed “puree” on the
blender.

Dante’s Cove: The
Complete Second Season, available this week in a two-disc set from Genius
Products, revisits the peaceful beach town where not everything is as its
seems, and checks back in on the sexy, young denizens, picking up where season
one left off. Hunky barkeep Toby (Charlie David) and the older, menacing
Ambrosius (William Gregory Lee) continue to fight for the affection of Kevin (Gregory
Michael), while artist Van (Nadine Heiman) asks witchy sorceress Grace (Tracy
Scoggins) to help teach her to use her newfound powers, much to the dismay of
her girlfriend Michelle (Erin Cummings).

The residents of the Hotel Dante are forced to deal with
many tough obstacles this season, including addiction, infidelity, coming out,
breaking up and death. (No split personalities or evil twins… yet.) Several
newcomers also join the diverse cast this season, including Queer as Folk’s Thea Gill as Diana, a
woman whose past and future are intertwined with the lives of Grace and
Ambrosius, and Gabriel Romero as Marco, the handsome owner of the local outdoor
bar. Other new characters include bad boy Kai (German Santiago), who’s
good at getting his customers what they need, legal or illegal, and Colin
(Dylan Vox), who runs the island’s private sex club and naturally conceals a
dark secret that comes to compromise some of his illicit endeavors.

Dark Shadows, of
course, was the original supernatural-tinged sudser, and I guess NBC tried the
same thing a few years back with one of their daytime offerings, a series whose
name currently escapes me. For better or worse, Dante’s Cove utilizes these elements fairly sparsely, meaning there’s
lots of teeth-gnashing dialogue and emoting instead of deep and labyrinthine explication
by way of intra-show mythology. What the series most has going for it is its
abundance of secrets and reversals, and the manner in which the show’s writers
run these back and forth, across one another. Still, the characterizations
really hew quite frequently to a rather WeHo-narrow interpretation of gay life,
and the camp-factor alone can’t make this worthy of crossover viewing for most mainstream
soap fans.

Housed in a regular Amray case, and presented in widescreen with an English language stereo track,
the set’s bonus fatures include a smattering of deleted scenes and a handful
of brief featurettes. The men and women of the cast (and yes, there are some,
despite the boys’ prominence in the show’s marketing, per the above) get separate
featurettes, and other behind-the-scenes material gives viewers a bit of a peek
at the making of the show. For more information, visit the series’ web site by
clicking here. C- (Series) B (Disc)