Embracing The Melodrama: The Client List (dir by Eric Laneuville)

Posted on April 15, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2010’s The Client List, Jennifer Love Hewitt stars as Samantha Horton.

Samantha’s a former beauty queen whose mother (Cybill Shepherd) always hoped would go on to win Miss Texas and then maybe appear in movies and on television. Instead, Samantha got knocked up by her boyfriend, Rex (Teddy Sears). Rex was a football star at UT so marrying him didn’t seem like it would be a dead-in but then Rex blew out his knee. Now, they’re living in small town Texas, they’ve got three children, and they’ve got a bank threatening to foreclose on their home. When Samantha and Rex head down to the bank, their loan officer spends the entire time staring at Samantha’s chest while Samantha reveals that she has a photographic memory.

Desperately needing a job and with Rex drinking away his troubles, Samantha gets a job at a massage parlor the next town over. Naively, Samantha assumed that her job would actually just be to give men massages. Instead, it turns out that the massage parlor is actually a brothel where the workers continually tell each other that it “beats the heck out of waitressing.”

(They don’t say “heck” but I gave up cursing for Lent.)

At first, Samantha is disgusted by the idea of working as a prostitute. But, with Rex drinking too much and the house about to bet taken away, Samantha goes back to the parlor and soon becomes the most popular person working there. She works herself to exhaustion but one of her clients has just the solution for that. “I’ve never even smoked weed before,” Samantha says while looking at the baggie of cocaine. I’m sorry …. you dated someone who went to UT without ever smoking weed? I don’t buy that.

Samantha can now stay awake for hours, going to work and buying her family a lot of Christmas presents. Samantha’s clients include some of the most powerful men in the county. When one of her co-workers confesses to having doubts about the job, Samantha sends her to a church group so she’ll have someone to talk to. Soon, words gets out that the massage parlor is a house of prostitution and Samantha is getting arrested and led out of the parlor in her underwear while TV cameras roll. “That looks kind of like your wife,” someone says to Rex.

The Client List caused quite a stir when it aired on Lifetime back in 2010. (It also led to a TV series where Jennifer Love Hewitt starred as a different character.) It’s an enjoyably sordid story, one that embraces the melodrama and mixes morality and sex in a way that would have made Cecil B. DeMille proud. The film takes place in my homestate and, fortunately, it stars a lot of Texas-born actors so the accents are authentic, even if the dialogue was obviously written by a Yankee. (“She’s as busy as popcorn,” a character said at one point and I nearly went blind from rolling my eyes.) That the film actually carries some emotional weight is totally due to the lead performance of Jennifer Love Hewitt, who I’ve always liked because we’re both Texas girls and we’ve both got big boobs so I feel like we share the same struggle. Hewitt gives an authentic and heartfelt performance here, leaving no doubt that everything that Samantha does, she does for her family. The Client List is a true Lifetime classic.

Horror Film Review: Final Destination 2 (dir by David R. Ellis)

Posted on October 25, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

After I rewatched Final Destination, I watched it’s sequel, 2003’s Final Destination 2.

Final Destination 2 is not only one of the best horror sequels ever made but it’s also the film that, even more than the first installment of the series, established what we consider to be a typical Final Destination film. The characters are far more eccentric and the deaths are far more elaborate. Death itself shows a sense of humor that wasn’t present in the first Final Destination film. If you manage to escape Death the first time, Death isn’t just going to track you down. It’s going to play without and have some fun before it finally fills its quota.

Final Destination 2 opens with Kimberly Corman (AJ Cook) having a vision of a crash on the interstate. She’s so freaked out by her vision that she blocks the entrance ramp. This may save the life of everyone stalled behind her but it also ends up killing all of her friends when a truck smashes into her SUV. Fortunately, Kimberly survives because she had gotten out of the vehicle to talk to a policeman named Thomas Burke (Michael Landes).

So, the bad news is that all of Kimberly’s friends are dead.

The good news is that Kimberly has a whole new group of friends, all of the people who were supposed to die on that highway but who are now alive and on Death’s do-over list as a result of Kimberly’s actions.

Along with Kimberly and Thomas, Death now has to take care of lottery winner Evan Lewis (David Paetaku), stoner Rory (Jonathan Cherry), neurotic chainsmoker Kat (Keegan Tracy Connor), teacher Eugene Dix (T.C. Carson), and Nora (Lynda Boyd) and her son, Tim (James Kirk). It turns out that Death is not only after them because they didn’t die on the highway but also because they all have a connection to the deaths that occurred in the first Final Destination. It’s actually a pretty clever idea and it also provides an excuse for Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) to return from the first film and act as a sort of death guru.

Needless to say, the deaths are elaborate. In fact, they’re so elaborate that Final Destination 2 occasionally feels like a satirical take on the first film. It’s not just that Nora loses her head in an elevator accident. It’s that there just happens to be an old man carrying a box full of claws on the elevator. In another scene, Rory looks inside a closet and sees hundreds of things that could possibly kill him, my favorite being the bowling ball that just happens to be precariously balanced on the top shelf. When Clear Rivers returns, she doesn’t just explain how death works. She also gives them a list of safety precautions that make her sound like an overly protective parent, looking at her son or daughter’s apartment and freaking out over how many appliances have been plugged into one outlet.

Final Destination 2 is a clever film with an appropriately dark and macabre sense of humor. On the one hand, all of the characters are well-written and the cast is so likable that you don’t want to see any of them die. On the other hand, Death is so inventive that it’s hard not to want to see what it has up its sleeve. And, like the first film, the sequel works because it gets at a universal truth. You can avoid death but can never truly escape it.

Guilty Pleasure No. 7: Final Destination 2

Posted on May 25, 2013 by Arleigh

The Final Destination series started off as a nice little horror film with a pretty original take on the slasher genre. We don’t have a psycho maniac on the loose killing off teens and pretty young adults. No, this film had Death itself stalking the usual photogenic and stereotypical young people (and the token adult). The film didn’t just have Death stalking and killing them but doing so in the most complex Rube Goldberg-like death scenes ever on film.

As with any horror film that has any sort of success this one received a sequel and then more sequels until it has become an almost bi-yearly event. My favorite of the series will always be the second film in the franchise.

Final Destination 2 is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, but what it lacked in the fresh originality of the first film it more than made up in the inventiveness of it’s kills. Final Destination 2 makes absolutely no sense whatsoever other than Death decides to kill off a bunch of new young people. The film’s plot doesn’t even follow the same rules brought up in the first film. But none of that matters because it’s all about the kills and deaths. From the eye-opening freeway pile-up in the beginning of the film to a large plate glass literally squashing a teenage boy straight into the pavement, the kills in this film could never truly be topped by any of the others later on in the series.

As a guilty pleasure this one is always a must-see for me. Though I make sure I’m not going out on a drive any time soon after seeing it.