SPOILERS**
Kind of a twisted plot in detail but familiar enough that it should hold no big surprises for the viewer. Ellen applies for a job at a brokerage. She gets it with the connivance of the secretary Dierdre, although Ellen knows nothing about the sub rosa activities and thinks of Dierdre merely as a knowledgeable new office friend. Ellen runs into some rivalry at the office from another broker, Ted, who has been boffing Dierdre at night and whose career is on the skids. As Ellen and Ted begin working together, however, they each find that the other isn't so bad. I hope you're following this because it gets worse. Late one afternoon, while Ellen and Ted are hard at work on a rush job, Dierdre sets a fire and rings the alarm, so Ellen and Ted must go to his house to finish work. Later that night they part on friendly terms. Then Dierdre sneaks into Ted's house and plugs him in the back of the head while he's taking a hit from his drink, which, if you have to go, is the way to do it. The action is a little fuzzy here, or maybe my attention was drifting. After the foul deed, Dierdre gets the briefcase containing Ellen and Ted's joint project and soaks it in Ted's blood. Then she types an incriminating message on Ted's PC, which reads: "Ellen. I'm sorry, I just couldn't do this anymore." Somehow this message reaches the police as, "I just couldn't take it anymore," with no addressee. The intrigue becomes mollasses-thick. A pleasant blonde named Marcia catches on to Dierdre's machinations and is run over by her. Dierdre then takes Ellen aside and tells her the whole story. Ellen, prompted by Dierdre, and haunted by an earlier suicide in her past, has lied to the police. And Dierdre has planted incriminating evidence all over the place. Dierdre kidnaps one of Ellen's children and demands that Ellen transfer six million bucks to an account in the Philippines. Dierdre, it turns out, has been doing all of this in order to win the love and respect of her paraplegic father who was thrown down a flight of stairs by -- well, let's forget it. A shoot out between the police and Dierdre is narrowly avoided at the end.
You don't realize what an act of benificence this plot outline has been, but now, having read it, you don't really have to bother watching the movie. Most of the acting is up to TV-fodder par. Ellen has a neatly smooth aristocratic nose. Dierdre's nose is okay until it reached it's very end where we find a curious knob with a kind of phallic sulcus running down its middle. Dierdre is the most interesting person to look at in the movie. She has one of those engaging figures: slender limbs and a mammoth bosom, its size matched by those of her wide and expressive eyes, with the whites showing all around their dark irises. Her face vaguely recalls that of Jennifer Beals. Dierdre's performance runs sequentially through (1) amiable innocence, (2) malevolent sinistry, and (3) semi-psychotic rage. If she overacted more than she does, she could play the light bulbs too.
But her eyes fascinate. In fact, eyes are the most interesting feature of the entire movie. Take the eyes of Barry Bostwick as Ellen's husband. They are set so close together that they seem to be straining to reach one another across the pass between his nose and eyebrows. Too bad he's not a politician; he would get the vote of every political cartoonist in town. Then there's Marcia, the well-meaning blonde who gets deliberately squished by Dierdre. Her eyes are set so far apart that they seem almost on the sides of her face, like an iguana's. Just having a little fun. Actually Bostwick's performance is adequate -- he plays the generic understanding but ultimately helpless husband. And Marcia does allright by the role too.
But there is simply no imagination in the movie. Nothing is new. There are no insights into characters beyond the most banal. The director leads us step by step through the plot like the guide at a theme park. The story could have been written by a committee whose assignment was to produce "something about a nasty secretary who tries to kill her way into a fortune, with the central figure being another victimized woman, too trusting for her own good."
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