Review of The Corndog Man (1999) by Pamela D — 11 Jul 2011

Unlikely and maudlin, this cleverly made film has a great stalking premise, but drops the ball when it loses focus in a morass of preachy racial tolerance sermonizing and mental hygiene. The underlying motivation for the stalking is sappy and far-fetched, and the stalker's success would be dubious in real life given the standard and enthusiastic use of pen registers and call tracing. The victim does some things which would be out of character. Then the plot sort of falls apart and peters out.

The producers missed a chance for multiple twists and better intrigue, yet while this movie falls short of the mark in a variety of ways, there's a lot of ingenuity in the filming, and you can't take your eye's off the story, for want of seeing how it will play out. The filmmakers had a racial/moral agenda, and seem to have put the story together to satisfy the need for some personal axe grinding, yet if minor changes were made to the antagonist's motivation, this could have been top notch film.

As it is, it's annoyingly condescending in it's need to make a point: bigotry is bad. Yes, we know. Thanks. We didn't need the filmmakers to tell us that. By the same token, our kids don't need the Ten Commandments pasted to their school desks to understand by reading the commandment, "thou shalt not kill," that murder is bad.