Cleaning Out The DVR: Dangerous Seduction (dir by Jean-Francois Rivard)


I recorded Dangerous Seduction off of the Lifetime Movie Network on May 5th!  It’s also known as The Queen of Sin.

So, here’s the thing:

Posy Pinkerton (Christa B. Allen) seems like she should have the perfect life.  She’s in her 20s and she’s already engaged to a doctor!  Add to that, she’s a talented artist who has an up-and-coming career as a medical illustrator!  Seriously, she can make a heart so realistic that you half-expect it start pumping blood through a body!

However, things aren’t always as perfect as they seem.  For one thing, Posy is terribly shy and repressed.  She rarely goes out or has any fun.  Her fiance is the type who turns down a night of wild sex so that he can go to the hospital and check on a patient.  I mean, seriously — what type of doctor does that!?  (Other than a doctor who doesn’t want to get sued for malpractice, of course…)  Posy’s even too shy to really pursue her career.  Her best friend and cousin, Laura (Amber Goldfarb), says that Posy needs to have at least one wild fling before she gets married but Posy…

Well, Posy actually kind of agrees, even if she won’t admit it.

Things get complicated after Posy and Laura are the two last people to see a woman who is murdered shortly after she jogs past them.  For Laura, it means meeting the handsome and single Detective Dagliesh (Sergio Di Zio).  Who cares if the murder gets solved as long as Dagliesh and Laura get together!?  They’re a cute couple!  As for Posy … well, Posy is now being followed but she doesn’t realize it.

When Posy meets Jack (Richard de Klerk), she is immediately charmed.  Remember that one wild fling that Laura recommended?  Jack appears to be that fling.  Soon, Posy is giving into an alter ego that she created for herself, the so-called Queen of Sin.

What Posy doesn’t know is that Jack works for someone who knows a little bit about sin himself.  Charlie (Marc Thibaudeau) is a millionaire who deals with his ennui by hiring Jack and Stella (Inga Cadranel) to capture sex slaves, all of whom are eventually murdered by Charlie once he tires of them….

So, needless to say, there’s a lot going on in Dangerous Seduction but, in the end, it all becomes a fairly standard Lifetime kidnapping film.  That’s not a complaint, of course.  Lifetime generally makes the best abduction films and Dangerous Seduction deserves some credit for trying to do something a little bit different from the genre.  The film starts off as almost a Fifty Shades of Grey type of film, with Posy exploring her sexual fantasies with Jack and then it becomes a murder mystery before ultimately ending up as a “let’s-escape-from-a-mad-man’s-mansion” film.

It’s nicely done.  Whether capturing the shadows of Charlie’s mansion or the stark loneliness of a fresh crime scene, the films always looks great.  (The film’s cinematography is credited to Sergio Di Rosa.)  The actors all do a good job.  Though Posy, with her constant self-doubt, can be a bit difficult to take, Amber Goldfarb is likable and fun as Laura and the between-the-lines romance between her and Dagliesh is fun to watch.

Lifetime always reruns their films a few hundred times so keep an eye out for this one!

Weekly Reading Round-Up : 06/17/2018 – 06/23/2018, The Horror — The Horror —


Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)'s avatarRyan C.'s Four Color Apocalypse

I guess I’ve been at this long enough to see when de facto themes generally, if inadvertently, present themselves within the “framework” of any given week’s releases, and when Image Comics has four horror books (all priced at $3.99 each, so keep that in mind as you evaluate whether or not these are worth the dent to your wallet) come out on the same Wednesday, well shit, it’s pretty obvious what we should be talking about, isn’t it? Doesn’t really take a “veteran” critic at all, as a matter of fact —

I had been cool to Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino’s Gideon Falls to this point — so much so that I had been intending, most likely, to drop it after the conclusion of its first “arc” — but with issue number four, now I’m no so sure. Lemire is (painfully) obviously going for some sort of low-rent Twin…

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4 Shots From 4 Films For World UFO Day: The Eyes Behind The Stars, Starcrash, War of the Robots, Star Odyssey


4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking.

Happy World UFO Day!

4 Shots From 4 Films

The Eyes Behind The Stars (1978, dir by Mario Gariazzo)

Starcrash (1978, dir by Luigi Cozzi)

War of the Robots (1978, dir by Alfonso Brescia)

Star Odyssey (1979, dir by Alfonso Brescia)

Music Video of the Day: Alien by Die Antwoord featuring The Black Goat (2018, dir by NINJA)


Happy World UFO Day!

For reasons that I’m not really sure about, World UFO Day is celebrated on two separate days.  It’s celebrated on both June 24th and July 2nd!  There used to be an official World UFO Day website that undoubtedly explained the whole thing but that site is now apparently offline.  Well. here at the Shattered Lens, we celebrate World UFO Day in June because, come July 2nd, we’re usually too busy stocking up on illegal fireworks to deal with any intergalactic visitors.

(For the record, I will be celebrating World UFO Day by cleaning out my DVR.)

So, today is Happy UFO Day and I picked this video because … well, actually, the song isn’t really about UFOs.  It’s about someone who feels like an alien because they don’t fit in with the rest of the world.  I think we all know what that feels like.  As for the video, there’s really no proof that the main character is from outer space.  Would visitors from outer space really want to come to Detroit?

But you know what?  I like the song.  And I like the video.

Maybe you will too.

Enjoy!

Gettin’ a Woody: EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX* (United Artists 1972)


gary loggins's avatarcracked rear viewer

*(but were afraid to ask)

Say what you will about Woody Allen (and I’m sure some of you will), but from 1969 to 1977 he wrote, directed, and starred in some of the laugh-out-loud funniest movies ever made (after that, things got a bit pretentious, and his output has been hit-or-miss far as I’m concerned). Allen’s inventive mind took Dr. David Reuben’s best-selling sex manual EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX (*but were afraid to ask) and turned it into a hilarious anthology that skewers not only societal mores and morals, but every segment parodies a different film genre.

Some are better than others, but each has something funny to offer. The first, “Do Aphrodisiacs Work?”, finds Woody as a medieval court jester whose lousy Bob Hope one-liners bomb with the King (Anthony Quayle). The randy jester is dying to enter the Queen’s (Lynn Redgrave) “royal chambers”, but…

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What Lisa Watched Last Night #183: The Wrong Daughter (dir by Ben Myerson)


Last night, I watched The Wrong Daughter on the Lifetime Movie Network!

Why Was I Watching It?

I think I must have missed The Wrong Daughter when it originally premiered on Lifetime.  Maybe I was out spying on the neighbors or something.  Who knows?  Fortunately, Lifetime always shows their movies about a hundred different times during the year so, last night, I got a chance to catch up!

What Was It About?

Kate (Cindy Busby) has a lot to deal with!  Not only is she trying to open up her own restaurant but she and Joe (Jon Prescott) are desperate to start a family.  In the aftermath of another failed IVF treatment, Kate promptly starts repainting the nursery and talking about how she could turn the room into an office.  (Interestingly, they live in a pretty big house so I’m kind of surprised she didn’t have an office already.)  However, Joe has a solution!  Maybe Kate could try to track down the girl that she gave up for adoption 17 years ago!

Meanwhile, 18 year-old Samantha (Sydney Sweeney) is just about to get kicked out of her group home.  Abandoned by her mother when she was born, Samantha has never been adopted.  Why not?  Well, it might have something to do with Samantha being slightly psychotic.  And while you may be thinking that Samantha is probably Kate’s long lost daughter, she’s not!  However, her roommate is!  When Samantha runs away and steals Danica’s (Sierra Pond) laptop, she discovers a message from Kate, announcing that she’s Danica’s mother and inviting Danica to come see her.

Soon, Samantha is at Kate’s restaurant, dressed demurely, claiming to be Danica, and working her way into Kate and Joe’s life.  Meanwhile, the real Danica just wants her laptop back.  Samantha, however, is happy being Danica and is willing to do anything — from bribing an old homeless woman to pretend to be the head of the group home when Kate calls to murdering anyone who turns their back on her — to remains so.

What Worked?

This was a pretty good example of the “killer imposter” genre of Lifetime films.  Movies like this pretty much live and die based on the performance of the imposter and Sydney Sweeney did a good job playing the duplicitous Samantha.  It was especially fun to watch her switch back and forth between being demure Danica and murderous Samantha.

What Did Not Work?

How naive can one person be?  That’s kind of the question that I had to ask about Kate, who was both a savvy businesswoman and yet somehow was easily fooled by even the most obvious of Samantha’s lies.  As much fun as it was to watch Kate get fooled over the phone by a crazy homeless woman, it was still hard not to wonder how that could have possibly happened in the first place.

“OMG!  Just like me!” Moments

From the minute Samantha first climbed through the window of her group home, I started having flashbacks.  That’s the same way that I used to sneak out of the house.  When you’re growing up in the suburbs, it helps to be a good climber.

Lessons Learned

Protect your laptop with you life.

Eurocomics Spotlight : “Land Of The Sons”


Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)'s avatarRyan C.'s Four Color Apocalypse

There’s no doubt about it : the post-apocalyptic world isn’t what it used to be. Somewhere, somehow, we swapped out The Road Warrior for The Road, and the whole idea of living in an irradiated wasteland, well — it started looking like a lot less fun.

Which, of course, is a change in favor of the decidedly more accurate — yet when the whole idea was fun, nobody had more fun with it than the Italians, who made a veritable industry out of cranking out low-budget  Mad Max knock-offs like EndgameWarriors Of The Wasteland, or my personal favorite of the bunch, Exterminators Of The Year 3000.  Cartoonist Gipi has apparently chosen to ignore this, let’s face it, less-than-proud tradition of rip-roarin’ adventure set after world’s end laid down on celluloid by fellow countrymen Joe D’Amato, Enzo G. Castellari, Giuliano Carnimeo, and others, and instead is…

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