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Demons from Her Past is one of those awesome DVD’s that attempt to try and advertise itself as a horror movie by putting some creepy images on its cover and a corpse’s hand holding a photo on the back. Despite the cool imagery and the amazing marketing savvy of Lionsgate, Demons from Her Past is a simple made for TV movie that has absolutely nothing to do with the horror genre. For anyone that saw the movie The Rival earlier this year, you know what I’m talking about.

The film is about a woman who is basically a jaded housewife whose marriage ends in divorce… and then she decides to go and ruin three men’s lives to make herself feel better about being a worthless loser that doesn’t have to work and spends her time holding a grudge over something that happened twenty years in the past. The woman tools around a small town threatening to uncover the truth behind a fatal car accident that she was blamed for… the three guys she is threatening don’t like it very much and thanks to her pointless blabbering they know she is on their case, so, like the typical men that they are, they start planning how to get rid of her. Only, they can’t because she is a super tough and sassy ex-housewife with a chip on her shoulder and a face that looks like a pub urinal filled with piss-soaked chunks of vomit. Basically… this movie premiered on Lifetime, so you know there is going to be lots of female bonding, female complaints about their husbands, and some lesbian undertones.

The director of this film has made 11 TV movies within the last three years with another two already in production. With that type of schedule, it’s no surprise that this film looks like exactly what it is, an exploitive piece of TV quality drama that panders to the difficult life of useless housewives that sit around on their ass while the rest of the world goes out to work. Douglas Jackson’s film is boring as hell, visually and thematically. Of course, housewives can’t handle anything that doesn’t reek of suburbanite uniformity, so I guess Jackson is just pandering to his target audience with cookie-cutter visuals and a direct-by-numbers style.

The acting in the film is terrible… not to mention the fact that all of the women in the film are distractingly ugly. Alexandra Paul plays the protagonist and she has what I typically characterize as a “bitch-face.” This is not to say that Alexandra Paul is a bitch, for all I know, she may be the nicest person on the planet; she just happens to have the misfortune of possessing one of those mugs that send shivers down battered husbands’ spine everywhere… the type of face you see and the word “bitch” automatically pops into your head, plus she has no acting skill whatsoever. Sophie Gendron, who plays the equally as evil wife of the main “bad” guy, is also distractingly ugly. Her lips are strange to look at and smack of botched collagen injections and her cheeks appear to have been surgically reconstructed, but all of these modifications are necessary in Hollywood when you can’t act. I think the casting choices are a result of director Jackson trying to not have hot chicks in his movies so the Lifetime crowd won’t look at themselves and realize that they are hideous cows with no place in society.

This film is boring as hell, and there is no point in watching the film. The main character’s worthless efforts to bring three men to justice just doesn’t work, as she really doesn’t do anything to help the situation. All she does is beg men to say they’re sorry and sign confessions. How is that an empowering film for women? Without the agreement of the men she wants justice from she can’t do shit. It just goes to show that Lifetime is not a channel dedicated to providing quality entertainment for intelligent women, but, rather, it is a station designed to uphold gender stereotypes and pander to the behaviors that make life difficult for women that actually want respect. It is exploitive and brainless, and now they want to market this shit as a horror movie. The audacity is astounding.

Final Synopsis: The film is poop. Housewives might like it, but I don’t recommend they watch it because it might seem to justify the values and worthlessness of the housewife in contemporary society. Everyone else avoid this.

Points Lost: -1 for sucking, -1 for a lame main character, -1 for excessively distracting ugly people… for a second I thought I was watching Todd Browning’s Freaks, -1 for boring direction, -1 for making the woman’s success hinge completely on masculine acquiescence, -1 for shitty dialogue, -1 for crappy pointless female bonding moments that curdled my stomach, -1 for some crappy narration from the main character,

Lesson Learned: Don’t piss off housewives; they have nothing better to do than spend their days fucking up your life. Fear the housewife.

Burning Question: What’s the last shitty movie you watched, just because the cover was a little cool but ultimately misleading? The worst one I ever saw was Death Games… some BS from The Asylum.

Demons from Her Past
2/10

Tags: 2007, alexandra paul, douglas jackson, drama, latest movie reviews, mystery, recent, shitty movies, thriller, tv movie