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Rating:  - A dull view of a disaster
There seemed to be hope that "Right at Your Door" would be an intense and realistic view into a dirty bomb attack on a major American city. Our main character desperately tries to get to his wife through a torrent of confusion, police officers, and onlookers. Distraught, he returns home. And stays there. The rest of the film is spent in the confines of the house. There is never any real sense of the monumental disaster going on downtown. It is only the fear and panic of a few people, and it is explored only on a superficial level.
In fact, this reminds me of an off Broadway play. You get glimpses of smoke in the background, occasional sirens, peeks out of the window, but there is little here that couldn't be found on stage. The movie attempts to capture the raw emotion of a man, his wife, and a neighbor in crisis and isolated, but the result is downright boring. There is little connection to the plight of the city and its residents, and the disconnect makes this largely uninteresting. Yes, there is a twist at the end, but it doesn't make up for the lack of tension or storyline required to get to it.
Rating:  - "Zoned"
If this film had been shortened to an hour it might-I repeat "might"-have made a decent episode of Twilight Zone.
Rating: - Revenge of the Nerds
Watch out for the Dirty Bomb!
No, silly, I'm talking about this movie!
Meet crack business warrior Lexi (Mary McCormack bringing home the bacon AND frying it up in a pan AND...uh, FRYING): hard-charging yuppie on a mission. The Early Bird gets the Germ!
Meet schlubby unemployed loser husband Brad (shlubby unemployed loser actor Rory Cochrane): watch as he ponders the breathless pace of his morning---will it be cheese doodles? Dr. Phil? Cheese Doodles *with* Dr. Phil?
WATCH! There really are Two Americas---Lexi in the one that works, Brad in the one that doesn't (but chums off America #1). So tighly-wound yuppie chick on a mission Lexi gets up early and motors it onto the LA freeway, while schlubby husband Brad, unemployed, part of a 'band' (hey, man, he's got guitars to prove it! he's cool! yeah!) schlubbs around the house after trying a little AM whoopee (dead sexy, Brad! hot! rowwwr you Romeo you!) with the wife.
Lexi goes to work. Brad stays home, presumably to chill on the couch, eat cheese doodles, watch Dr. Phil.
GASP! As Terrorists, meanwhile, bored of GTA4 with nothing better to do, do a little urban jihad on old LA with a bunch of combo hit LA with a bunch of combo chemical/biological bombs that turn everyone in hotzone (translation: workers of the world, exfoliate!) into walking geiger counters, Lexi included, and soon LA has more air quality worries than a little smog.
Brad, meanwhile, gets to---uh, stay in the house, eat cheese doodles, and lounge around on the couch. Score one for Brad!
MORAL #1: Being unemployed and lounging around the house watching Dr. Phil and eating cheese doodles is a lot better than sucking down a load of Ebola Zaire-Anthrax-Mustard Gas blister agent! And it's even more useful than stocking up on bottled water and duct tape if you wanna make it through a terrorist dirty bomb attack!
MORAL #2: The Glass Ceiling ain't got a thing on the Anthrax Ceiling!
MORAL #3: Terrorists don't really appreciate the whole "Earth Day" thing.
Director Chris Gorak (formerly artistic director for Fight Club, etc., and that full command of grungy authenticity does come through here) really tries to generate a kind of crescendo of mortal terror with "Right at your Door", and you've got all the nods to the great apocalyptic flicks: soldiers and fuzz in hotsuits and gas masks grunting out muffled orders, the city sinking mortally wounded into terror, and death, and darkness, and some workably impressive backdrops of a doomed and dying Los Angeles cityscape.
It would work nicely if the movie weren't a complete bore.
It could be a stage show, comprised of three characters: Shlubby Brad, Sexy Lexi, and the next door neighbor's Mexican handyman who Brad inexplicably bonds with, proving there are no atheists in foxholes, but there sure are a lot of weirdos.
Given that the handyman gets bored and wanders off midway through the show (I feel your pain, amigo!), that means "Right at your Snore" is an intimate little duel between two characters. That would work if we're talking David Mamet (a la "Glengarry Glen Ross"), but here we're more at the level of Oprah (a la "Women who love Men who love Midgets with Big Butts).
Nothing really happens. The three characters take turns looking 1) nervous 2) constipated 3) nervously constipated 4) dialing around on their cell phones & texting 5) drinking bottled water. That's it. Occasionally The Man comes around (in gas mask! In hazmat suit! with machine gun! rat a tat tat!) looking a little confused and pokes a flashlight at Brad.
Here the tension boils down to this: can Brad get his fat butt off the couch long enough to call 911? Don't believe me? Here's a sampling of film dialogue:
BRAD: Honey, I'm so sorry, I hate that you gotta sit out there on the porch and die. Hey where did you put the cheese doodles?
LEXI: I'm glad you're safe honey! I'm glad you stayed home and watched dr. phil! Does this portable gas mask make my butt look fat?
The biggest problem with "Right" is I didn't believe a minute of it.
Bottom line: take a good hard look at Lexi. Then check out Brad. Go ahead. I'll wait. Back? OK: you and I both know if Brad did what he did to Lexi at about 30 minutes in, it would have taken her about 2 seconds to do a SWAT roll through the kitchen door and sent Brad (courtesy of the Flying Roundhouse Chop) for a little quality time with the formica floor. Terminated! With Extreme Prejudice!
Check out that little crinkly delta of pure red rage wrinkles that crop up around the time she realizes her unemployed loser husband is keeping her out of her own home: yeah, baby, it's CLOBBERIN' TIME! If Lexi had drop-kicked Brad across the dinette set at that moment, this flick would have gotten 5 stars. Mary McCormack actually is a real champ with her preposterous role (in any decent flick she would have been wearing Brad's ears for a war necklace about 5 minutes after his "you keep a knockin but you can't come in" moment.
I mean, jeez: Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, sure, but when Venus gets a little gas that's grounds for making her park it on the back porch forever?
Truth in advertising: this movie stinks. I guess it really *is* a Dirty Bomb.
JSG
Rating: - Brad, let me in!!
"Right At Your Door" was a huge disappointment from the start until about four minutes before the credits. It reminds me of "Monster" (no, not the one with Charlize Theron, the other one. The stupid one). It starts out auspiciously enough, with the "bombing" of L.A., then degenerates quite quickly from there. Rory Cochrane is unconvincing as Brad, the Husband. Mary Mc Cormack, as Lexi, the Wife, is just as bad.
Things move rather quickly during the bombing, but come to a screeching halt once Brad makes it back home. When Lexi finally decides she's had enough of running around like a chicken with it's head cut off, and makes it back home, as well, it's just yap, yap, yap at the back door, for much too long. I caught a little snooze time, as the next thing I saw, was Lexi being dragged off by someone in a bio suit, saying that she was the lucky one! Brad is convieniently "put out of his misery" with a gas that is piped into the house, to kill the virus/fungus/bugaboo, because it has incubated IN the house all that time! WOW! I sat through all that for THIS (well, it's at least better than "Monster")?!
That this dreck won awards at the Sundance Film Festival does not bode well for Independent Film. I expected better from Independent Filmmakers, as it appeared that they were the only ones to "go outside the envelope". Or, this could just be a fluke. I hope so, because I'm really not keen on going back to "regular" television!!
Rating: - A dumbed down and modernized Night of the Living Dead
This is not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, it is not very deep, it lacks emotion, good acting, and a plausible plot, but oh how ironic this film ends up being. You want irony? You got irony, and little else.
The film takes place in LA after a series of "dirty bombs" have gone off in downtown turning the streets of Americas 2nd largest city into a battlefield overnight. Husband and wife Brad and Lexi wake up one typical sunny day and go about their lives as usual. Lexi dries downtown to work while Brad stays home. Suddenly Brad feels the ground shake, hears a distant boom, and then messages start to come over the radio about a terrorist attack in the downtown area. After a useless attempt to find his wife, Brad seals himself off in his home and tries to make sense of the situation unfolding around him though scattered and confused radio reports.
The film is basically yet another play on our post 9/11 fears. This kind of movie has been done so many times since the towers fell that it's no longer original, depressing, and, more importantly, it's no longer scary. How many times are independent film makers, lacking in budget and talent, going to keep making this same movie over and over and over again? When will it stop? It is good to remember that day, but it isn't necessary to bombard us with these constant speeches and "artsy" films. Right at your Door is just another independent film trying to do its best with a low budget by pulling on our emotional strings and relying far too much on the events of 9/11 for its main themes. Not to say that's a bad thing, obviously films like Cloverfield, which came out earlier this year, managed to do just that in a very convincing way, but there are dozens of poorly made low budget independent films that all try to do basically the same thing. This film is nothing special.
The acting is okay overall, with Mary McCormack giving a superb performance as Lexi, while Rory Cochrane's portrayal of Brad was bland and unconvincing. The real meat of this film comes from what little we see of the devastation of LA. Although we see relatively little- the whole film takes place in their home and rarely moves outside of it- what we are shown of the disaster is stunning in its realism. The poison ashes raining from the sky like snow, a little boy staring at the smoke rising in the distance, its all very haunting and is far and away the best thing this film does. Unfortunately the suspense and dread built up in this film dies away as the film goes on. SPOILER!!!! Why is it, after about three days of being exposed to the poisons, does Lexi not feel any of its effects other then a cough when the news says people are dieing in the streets? END OF SPOILER!!! Why does Brad's car still drive after getting a flat tire? It doesn't make much sense.
This movie has some seriously twisted irony at the end, but it really isn't that hard to see coming, and it's hard to care when it does come because the characters aren't really the kind of people you'd care about. Who cares what happens to these people? Overall it's not really a film worth spending time and money on seeing, but if you HAVE to see it make sure you don't spend more then a couple dollars to do it and keep your hand on the fast forward button.
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