Review of Right at Your Door (2006) by Morgan G — 27 Feb 2008

This movie, overall, was well acted and fairly well directed, but the writing was for crap. It tended to be slow too, with a lot of dialogue, but a lot of repetitiveness too. If you like to use duct tape, you'll love this movie.

Some problems I had with this film:

First, from scene 1, the lighting is bad. There are a lot of interior shots that are poorly lit, and it gets distracting. The light coming in through the windows overpowers the room, and characters are all in kind of a muddy shadow.

Second, believability. This guy's wife gets home and he won't let her in because she's been out in this toxic cloud of filth. She begs and pleads to be let in, out of the toxic wasteland. No, he won't let her, because he'll get contaminated. OK, that's fine. Then he lets her into one bedroom and closes it off from the rest of the house. That's good too. Then, at one point, she goes [i]back outside[/i] and starts trapsing around in this crap again, for no reason other than she's absent-mindedly talking on her cell phone. What? Hello! It's a freaking toxic wasteland out there, Remember? The one you were begging to be let in from a couple of hours ago?

It also gets annoying that she does basically nothing to alleviate her own situation. Supposedly she's covered head to toe in white soot, which could be toxic. Does she take a shower? Well, eventually, after sitting around ruminating for half an hour. Does she even bother to take her clothes off so she's not walking around in toxic clothes? No. Please. I think I'd be a little more anxious to get all that crap off me.

And finally, the script is just poor. The male lead (I don't even care what his name is at this point) goes on some kind of diatribe in the middle of the film, while duct-taping (I'm not kidding, a good 20% of this film is people putting up duct tape). He rambles on about something, it's impossible to tell what his point is. Later, He tells his wife that she should go to the hospital, and practically in the same breath, he starts arguing with her that she shouldn't go. Well, which is it? The whole script comes off as a first draft, like nobody went back and polished up parts where, say, a woman went wandering around in a toxic cloud, or a guy argues both for and against something in the same conversation for no apparent reason.

There's also endless screaming and swearing. "What the f--k are you doing!" is heard a lot. The characters don't know what's going on, yell a lot about it, say the f-word a lot, but no answers ever come. It's just annoying.

(Spoilers from here on out).

Then, in the end, to cap it all off, they board the guy up in his own house because "virus levels in the house had reached toxic levels". And this is told to the lady who has been out in the toxic cloud for days, is showing signs of the disease... but they're treating her! The woman who has symptoms and is totally exposed, she gets treatment, and they kill the guy inside who has practically no exposure. WHAT the F--K???

In fact, I'm marking it down another two points, just for the insult to my intelligence.