Tag Archives: Gaslight

Shadow of a Woman Review

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This film is definitely more annoying than it is suspenseful. Mainly a film like this revolves around the lead being completely incapable of taking any definitive actions in order to keep going. That just means that the plot is really weak if you ask me. The movie has quality writing and there’s a lot going on but the story just doesn’t hold up because any reasonable character would have done some things way differently and that would have been the end of it. Over half of this film would have just been thrown out the window and you could even argue that 99% of it would end if the main character didn’t just jump into things at the start.

So this film starts with Brooke deciding to marry a guy named Eric that she barely knows. She knows that he’s a doctor but that’s about it. She allows herself to get swept up in the moment and marries him but why all the rush? That in itself should have been a red flag and then things only continue to get worse. First off, he’s not quite as well off financially as he had led her to believe. Someone tries to murder him by crushing him with a boulder initially and then someone else shoots at him later on. In each instance he tells Brooke that she’s imagining things or that it was someone hunting buffalo and she just takes this. What should have been the last straw is that he then says they have to live at his family’s place even though she has a perfectly acceptable home that they could have been in. Now she is an unwanted guest here and the tensions continue to rise. Is there something shady about this Eric fella?

The amount of suspension you have to put your belief through here is absolutely crazy. Why is Brooke willing to sacrifice so much of her life for someone that she barely knows? It just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever and that’s my main problem here. He continues to stack the deck against her and gets upset at her awful quick but Brooke just doesn’t put the pieces together. I’m not sure which moment is more drastic, Eric being shot at or his insisting they live at a place where nobody likes her. Either one should have been enough for her to keep her distance or at least stay in her home and insist he goes to her. Instead Brooke keeps trying to stick with it.

Now if they were married for ages and things had been going great then I could appreciate the loyalty here but instead it just feels like she is letting him walk all over her with no real resistance. Instead of being admirable it just makes her look weak if you ask me. Especially when his excuses are so weak. He spends the whole film constantly telling her that she’s crazy and seeing things and she just accepts this. It isn’t until the very end of the film where she starts to stick up for herself and by then it’s very nearly too late. So yeah I didn’t like Brooke. She may not be an antagonist the way that Eric is but she makes the job way too easy on him the whole time. If she had done just about anything then things wouldn’t have turned out the way that they did.

For example one thing Eric is doing here is starving a child as he hopes that the kid will die off and then he can claim the insurance money. I feel like you have to call the cops or child custody services immediately but Brooke sits on her hands for a while here and just doesn’t do anything. I suppose she feeds him her breakfast once but that’s more of a passive resistance. I want to see her actually doing something bold. She finds out he had another wife, that he’s using her to win a court case, etc. The twists and bad news just keeps coming in over and over again and she still doesn’t do much. Eric even tells her to stop seeing her doctor friend since he’s the only doctor she could ever need. Ah man.

Yeah this was an annoying one and it gets more annoying the more I think about it. Eric isn’t even a mastermind or anything because this plan should never have worked. The fact that it got this far is more of a strike against Brooke than it is a complement to his strength. His family is also afraid of him to the point where they keep his secrets and act as antagonists. I mean they even drug Brooke although the heroine forgives them rather quickly. They were just so spineless that they also end up being really bad characters here. They let Eric manipulate them for quite a long while and that’s another problem. Everyone just lets him do what he wants and they make the worst decisions possible.

One client of Eric’s seems to start to realize that he’s a scammer but she only works things out halfway. So she accuses him of all kinds of stuff and says she will wreck his career…but then she gets drunk and asks him to take her home. Lets just say she didn’t survive this ordeal and the whole thing makes you roll your eyes. How can you threaten someone and then trust him with your life? Throughout the film Eric actually bumps off quite a few characters and it’s not like he’s a super tough fighter or anything. Everyone just comes across as massive suckers the whole time so there’s not a whole lot that he needs to do.

Apparently it is well known that he is a scammer too but unfortunately there are enough people who don’t realize this that makes it tricky. There are always more people for him to trick after all and that’s always unfortunate. He gets away with a whole lot for a very long period of time and nobody could touch him. At least with the court case eventually the lawyer was going to defeat him but it was just taking way too long. I still think a quick call to the cops would have saved a great deal of time. The lawyer also got really lucky that Brooke talks a lot. Yes by the end there was a conscious effort to help him out but for part of the film Brooke was wrecking Eric’s plans accidentally with her outbursts which wasn’t as cool as it could have been. I wanted to see her as an intentional saboteur, not someone accidentally stumbling into success.

Overall, This film can be rather suspenseful but the characters really hold it back. It doesn’t come across as a very smartly written film and is instead one where everything just happens to turn out well for the villain because nobody can think ahead. If they actually made the right decisions then Eric wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far as he did. Ultimately you have to be able to stick up for yourself when the going gets tough and you also have to trust yourself. If someone tells you that you’re crazy then you have to believe your mind over that person. Things could have been so different here if Brooke was just a tough character. It’s not a bad movie but I would recommend most other suspense type films over this one. You’ll just be rolling your eyes too hard half the time at all the mistakes that are being made and it goes without saying that the romance is quite weak as well.

Overall 5/10

Gaslight (1944) Review

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Time for the next adaption of Gaslight. I was certainly not all that impressed with the first one and this title is only marginally better. Many of the same negatives from the first film reappear in this one. I’ll give this title credit for having what’s effectively a 30-40 minute prologue added in before we see the first scene of the original film readapted here. It adds some more context but also backfires. More on that later on.

Paula’s aunt was murdered one day which frightened everyone and so Paula was sent away for a while. We cut to the present where she has met up with a guy named Gregory and intends to marry him. It’s all going well until he says that he wants to move to London, the exact area where the aunt was murdered. Paula has done her best to get over this incident for many years and so she figures that she is ready to handle this. Unfortunately things begin to get misplaced and Gregory is always attacking her now that they are married. Will she be able to escape or will she fall for every trick over and over again?

So here’s why the whole extended origin fails here. We actually see how Paula’s life was quite happy and how she met Gregory. Right from the jump she should have said no to moving to the London squares…but fine she says that she’s over it so we can roll with that. Here’s where things get dicey. When she finds the letter with a mysterious name on it, Gregory snaps at her and immediately starts yelling and acting like the main villain. We’re still in the prologue here so the old film hasn’t started yet.

Right away Paula needed to have called him out here. She can’t just take that and let a bad precedence start. Then in the next scene we have Gregory casually mentioning that Paula tends to be a very forgetful person. Paula just accepts this for some reason when she should have quickly said no. The gaslighting here is so obvious and tactless that you’ll be shaking your head the whole time. It all happens so fast and since we’re actually seeing it this time, you have a hard time believing any of it. It just doesn’t make any kind of sense.

Paula isn’t nearly as broken as the first character by this point but it’s like her personality does a 180 as she was so confident and self assured but suddenly becomes extremely timid. It’s disappointing because she could have done so well and is instead faltering immediately. The rest of the movie gets worse and worse for her as Gregory just keeps on manipulating and humiliating her in front of everyone. If only she had signed the documents saying that she keeps all of the money because then she could have dashed out or something.

Regardless it would have been nice if she had gone outside more to talk to people and figure out what is going on. She’s rich to an extent and should easily be able to think of some things that can help. Hire some detectives or do something pro active to find out about the letter and why Gregory has changed so suddenly. She should have helped hire the maids and if anything she should have fired Nancy once she sensed how much antagonism was there.

One of the biggest problems with the film is that Paula’s barely a character. She just stands there and takes everything that Gregory throws at her. You wish she would do anything but instead she always ends up disappointing you. Finally there’s one area where she is worse than in the previous version. It’s near the end of the film when Brian is around to help her but everyone dashes off as Gregory shows up. In the first film she seems to actually think that it might have been a dream and starts to crack. In this one it seems like she panics at the thought of Gregory being against her and so she quickly tried to throw the other maid under the bus. I thought that was an extremely petty moment and it definitely made her look bad. That’s the kind of mistake that you can’t afford to make.

Of course Gregory’s a pretty awful villain too. The guy isn’t exactly subtle with all the noise he makes when trying to find the jewels. I wouldn’t even say that he’s a very smart villain because the whole plan revolves around Paula being easily manipulated and not able to do anything for herself. If Paula had talked to the nice next door neighbor or anyone then this could have all been avoided. Any scene with Gregory in it tends to be annoying for sure.

Nancy is also not a very nice maid. You’d think she would respect Paula as the head mistress more but unfortunately she is quickly able to sense the heroine’s weakness and pounces. The other maid was nice enough though and at least tried to look out for Paula. Then you have Brian who is doing his best to solve this case as soon as possible. The guy is dedicated and I’ll give him points for making a real effort here. In the end the guy took a very long time but he still helped save the day. The result is really what counts here.

The suspense for disbelief is just too much though. I like my main characters to be confident and self assured. Even if you are going to be a wallflower then I expect you to trust your own judgment and step up when the going gets tough. If Paula had gotten tough even once then that would have helped the film a great deal. The extended run time gives her more character but it almost doesn’t matter since it doesn’t change her actions later on. She still falls into all of the same holes so that whole intro may as well have not even happened at all.

Overall, Gaslight is a film that I have to give a full thumbs down too. The character cast isn’t quite interesting enough to counter all of the suspense for disbelief you have to go through. The old lady seemed nice enough but in the end she barely got to appear at all so I’m not even sure what the point of her character was. This adaption certainly added a whole lot of elements but since they didn’t change anything, they may as well have kept it the same. The movie beats the original but as I said earlier, it doesn’t do enough to make this a good movie. It’s still one that I would give a thumbs down to in the end. You’ll want to avoid this one for sure.

Overall 3/10

Gaslight Review

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Gaslight is one of those movies that would be over extremely early if the main character was stronger and could fight for herself. The whole premise only works if the main character is a complete pushover so right from the start I knew that this was going to be an annoying watch. As a result it ends up dragging quite a bit and you wish a different lead was around to shake things up. Ultimately this is a title that you will want to dodge but the title is fitting for the film.

The movie starts off with an old lady being murdered. The culprit was never found though so we jump forward into the future where two people have finally moved in. Bella and Paul. Right off the bat things don’t seem to be going well as Bella has to tip toe around the place while Paul enjoys humiliating her. He keeps telling her that she’s crazy and moving thing around to keep the act up. Bella slowly starts to believe that she really is losing her mind. Why is Paul doing this to her? Will Bella realize what is going on or will she really go mad?

As the film goes on you get a better idea of why Paul is doing this but you could probably guess for the most part. We know he is the villain from the start so there isn’t a mystery angle here, you’re just waiting for Bella to realize this and fast. Unfortunately she is too busy being tricked the whole time to do much of anything. My main problem with her is that she lets this happen so easily. Every time something goes missing or happens to pop up, she lets Paul throw on the accusations and doesn’t do anything about it. She doesn’t realize that it’s odd how she suddenly stopped getting mail or how her family has never visited.

It feels like misleading her was just way too easy. She’s too passive as a character and it’s why a modern remake of this film would likely play out very differently. Nowadays it’s hard to see this working for more than a few minutes. There’s just no way you would let someone trick you like this and not suspect something. She was also a bit annoying at the end as even once she found out he was a crook, she didn’t want to do anything to stop him because she thought it would be like a betrayal. Keep in mind that this is while he’s cheating on her with someone else.

You feel bad for Bella the whole time but the film didn’t do a good job of giving her any real agency here. If she could have ran out of the house to meet someone or try to do some detective work of her own then it could have worked out a little better. Instead that never happens. Meanwhile Paul is the main villain of course and definitely an annoying guy. The whole time he is messing around and just comes across as being rather insane. He’s also really greedy as he pulls off this plan while also cheating and searching quite loudly upstairs. He doesn’t do anything to be all that discreet and that’s what makes the whole thing even worse.

There’s definitely nothing remotely likable about this guy and even as a villain he just doesn’t work. Meanwhile you’ve got the two maids. Elizabeth was nice enough and at least tried to help Bella. Nancy was more antagonistic from the start and definitely didn’t mind making things tough on Bella as well. It’s clear from the start that Nancy was ambitious and hoping to move up in the world.

Finally you have Rough who is easily the most likable character here. I liked his absolute confidence at all times. The guy knew that he was onto something right from the jump and then never let go of his lead. Without him Bella would have definitely been doomed so it’s good that he made his move. He may not be the best fighter but in this case intelligence was what was mostly needed so that worked out well enough.

The film’s just not a very fun watch in the end which is what hurts it the whole time. It feels very mean spirited the whole time with how absolutely helpless Bella appears to be. If she was talking back or talking tough the whole time then that would have helped but instead she just bows to Paul’s every whim. I’d like to say that it’s completely unrealistic but I suppose there are some people like that. It’s just taken to the absolute extreme here.

Fortunately you can assume that she would be able to quickly rebuild her reputation once the film is over but she certainly went through a lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if she decided to move back to the country permanently instead and just say goodbye to the city life. After an experience like this you certainly couldn’t blame her.

The only positive thing I would say about the film is that the script is good. I wouldn’t say that the writing is because again, I think Bella should have picked up on at least some of the clues or done more to try and talk to peo0ple and see what was up. Defending Paul even near the end was also unfortunate and weakens the moment where she finally turns the tables. The script has that very classic polite feel to it though and works well in the context of the film. I always liked that retro style of dialogue and that certainly doesn’t change here.

Overall, Gaslight is a film I would certainly recommend avoiding. Paul takes up too many scenes and he’s such a bad character that he weakens those moments as a result. Then the film could have used a better main character for sure. Mix all of this in and it makes for a rather painful watch. I do think you could probably execute this premise well but the villain has to be a lot more resourceful and more of a genius because otherwise you can’t convince me that the main character could be tricked into becoming insane so easily. That’s just not how any of this works, not by a longshot!

Overall 2/10