If Mike Figgis, following his string of digital-video experiments, wanted simply to prove he could still make a regular movie, then the present project might be termed a success. It could hardly be more "regular," an obvious and overwrought thriller about a New York family (Dennis Quaid, Sharon Stone, and kids), in search of tranquillity, who, for a song, pick up a repossessed upstate mansion and all its belongings. What happens next, or subsequent to finding kiddie-porn Polaroids among the belongings, seems a staggeringly bad idea: hiring the ex-con former occupant (a bearded, ballcapped Stephen Dorff) as a handyman after he has entered the house without invitation, slurped down a free meal, practically drooled over the wife and teenage daughter, and generally matched the social manners of the ex-con in Cape Fear. Staggeringly bad ideas make for notoriously shaky foundations. The business of lowering a camcorder on a rope to find out what's at the bottom of a hidden well christened the Devil's Throat, is truly spooky, and truly unrepresentative of a movie that otherwise favors the Big Eek. With Juliette Lewis, Christopher Plummer. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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