Eva Mauro | Through the Shattered Lens

In 2009’s The Chaos Experiment, Val Kilmer stars as James Pettis, a twitchy man who shows up at the offices of a Michigan newspaper and says that he wants them to publish an editorial he has written. The editorial is about global warming (yawn) and the danger of humanity going extinct (double yawn). Pettis goes on to explain that he has trapped six people in a steam room and that he has turned the temperature up to 130 degrees, the better to demonstrate what destroying the environment is doing to humanity.

Cynical detective Manicni (Armanda Assante) is called and he listens to Pettis’s story. Mancini has some doubts as to whether or not Pettis is who he says he is. As Pettis describes what is happening in the steam room, Mancini comes to suspect that Pettis is either lying or else the murders happened a while ago. Pettis, for his part, seems to grow more and more delusional as he speaks to Manicni.

When we’re not listening to Mancini and Pettis, we’re watching six unfortunate people trapped in steam room. They are played by Eric Roberts, Patrick Muldoon, Megan Brown, Eve Mauro, Quinn Duffy, and Cordelia Reynolds. They start out as a friendly group but, once it becomes apparent that they’re trapped in the room, they lose it. They start turning on and attacking each other. The first to die is killed while strangling another hostage. The second is taken out by a unseen person with a nail gun. Cast as a former football player who claims to be from “Dallas-Fort Worth,” Eric Roberts goes from being the voice of reason to being a paranoid wreck. Meanwhile, the viewer is left to figure out whether or not any of this is happening or if it’s all just in Pettis’s mind.

I kind of cringed when Pettis said he had written an editorial about global warming but the environmental stuff is just a red herring. The film is actually about the cat-and-mouse game between Pettis and Detective Mancini and the investigation into whether or not Pettis has actually trapped six people in a steam room. It’s an intriguing premise and Val Kilmer gives a surprisingly committed performance as the unstable Pettis. Unfortunately, whenever the film cuts to the people in the steam room, it gets bogged down in all the usual Saw-style dramatics. I appreciate that the film found room for Eric Roberts to give a real performance (and Roberts does a good job, going from being affable to murderous over the course of the movie) but, even at the time when this film first came out, the people-trapped-in-a-room thing had been done to death and the scenes in steam room were ultimately a bit too repetitive to be as effective as they needed to be. That said, the film does end with a nice twist and it did hold my attention.

If nothing else, this is your only chance to see Val Kilmer, Armand Assante, Patrick Muldoon, and Eric Roberts, all in the same movie. That counts for something.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

Oh Hell yeah!

Now, this is a good Lifetime film!

Basically, Killer Dream Home tells the story of Jules (Maiara Walsh) and Josh Grant (John DeLuca). They’re young. They’re married. They’re hot. Josh never wears a shirt, which is kind of nice. They’ve just bought a gigantic house that they’re planning on flipping, though there’s no way I would ever give up that house because it’s seriously one of the best that I’ve ever seen. I mean, the pool alone is bigger than my back yard. They invite their friend, Bliss (Brooke Butler), to come live with them. You know that you’ve made it when you’ve got a blonde friend named Bliss.

They also end up hiring an interior designer named Morgan (Eva Mauro) but it turns out that Morgan might not be as perfect as their new house. First off, it turns out that Morgan’s entire portfolio was made up of pictures that she cut out of magazines. As soon as Morgan shows up, the first thing that she does is scare away the gardener, with whom she appears to have some sort of deep, dark history. The second thing she does is suggest to Jules that Josh might be cheating on her with Bliss. The third thing she does is get undressed while Josh is watching. Morgan attempts to seduce Josh and Josh is all like, “Just because I don’t own a shirt, that doesn’t make me a man whore!”

And so it goes. It all leads to murder, of course. It always does.

Killer Dream Home has everything that you could possibly want from a Lifetime film. It features beautiful people, beautiful houses, a lot of sex, and a few murders. (Morgan doesn’t hold back when it comes to killing people. Just as Jake is apparent allergic to shirts, Morgan is allergic to following a moral code.) Jake Helgren has directed a lot of these films and he definitely knows not only what the audience wants but also how to deliver it. Some might complain that Killer Dream Home is not a particularly realistic film but realism is not what we watch films like this for. We watch films like this for handsome husbands who never wear a shirt and dangerous femme fatales who wear scandalous bathing suits while using the pool. Lifetime films, at their best, create their own sort of alternative dream world and that’s certainly what Killer Dream Home accomplishes.

Killer Dream Home is a film that you experience more than you watch. It’s a journey into the heart of Lifetime melodrama, where every house is big and everyone is sexy and every stranger has a mysterious past. Watch this film for the house and the clothes and the wonderfully arch dialogue. Watch it for Eva Mauro’s unapologetically intense performance. Watch it for the scene where Morgan narrowly misses Bliss with a nail gun and then attempts to laugh it off. That nail gun gets quite a workout in Killer Dream Home. I should probably pick one up because they seem to be very useful.

Killer Dream Home is Lifetime at its best!