Director: Alex Nicol
Writers: Ernest A. Charles and Tony Crechales from a story by Peter Carpenter and Chris Marconi
From: Pure Terror (the last Pure Terror; only 3 remain overall!)
A lounge singer begins an affair with a record executive’s wife, but things spiral out of control into a nightmare of murder.
While laying on the beach one day, Tony is approached by Andrea, the woman who owns that stretch of beach. They flirt a bit and he invites her to see his act at a local nightclub. She shows up that night, goes back to his place, and listens to the record he’d released and seen tank. Andrea is the wife of the owner of the largest record label in the country and says she’s going to sign Tony and make him a star.
They work on the record and start having an affair. Her husband, disabled after a car accident from when he was chasing her in a jealous rage, sees them. He confronts Andrea and, in the ensuing struggle, falls in the pool. Andrea stands by and watches him drown. At his funeral, his daughter from a previous marriage, Helayne shows up and catches Tony’s eye.
Tony asks Andrea to marry him, but she laughs him off. He then threatens to turn her in to the police since he saw her husband’s death. She calls his bluff, though, and tells him she’s in control of what he does and what happens to him. She leaves for a long trip and Tony starts seducing Helayne. Helayne has inherited half of her father’s fortune.
Tony’s girlfriend tells him she’s pregnant, but he tells her to get rid of it. Helayne agrees to marry him, and, the night after the wedding, Andrea comes back. Tony tells her he married Helayne and that he doesn’t need Andrea anymore. Andrea says there was a clause in the will that said Helayne gets nothing if she gets married before she turns 25, ie. Andrea’s still in control. Tony says he doesn’t care, Andrea starts attacking him, and he accidentally (?) throws her over a cliff. Police rule it an accident. As Helayne and Tony are about to leave, Tony gets a phone call from his girlfriend. He goes to see her and she shoots him to death on her front porch. As he’s dying, he wakes up on the beach at the beginning of the movie with Andrea saying hello to him. It was all a dream.
Or was it?
Yes, it was. THE END
Let’s get the “It was all a dream” trope out of the way first. The trope is garbage because it means everything that happened, everything you’d spent time paying attention to, didn’t matter. Yes, it’s all made up anyway, but even in the context of being something made up, it didn’t matter. It’s like the movie is laughing at you for taking it seriously. Also, it’s stupid. It’s a stupid move to try to impose a twist upon your film.
This movie, though, was begging for anything to make it interesting. Fitting that we’d close out the Pure Terror set with Padding: The Motion Picture. I had the damnedest time even figuring out what the movie was supposed to be about while I was watching it.
We spend a lot of time watching Tony sing, see that he’s not very good, and be told by other characters how great a singer he is. A quick glance to the top tells me that, yes, the actor playing Tony was one of the story writers. None of that tells us what the plot is or is supposed to be. There is one flash to a woman being murdered by a home invader and I started to wonder if that was going to be the picture—that Tony was a serial killer, or the disabled husband was faking his disability, or there’s a killer running loose in the town and these people are going to get tied up in that drama. Nope, it was a falshback to Andrea taking out a hit on her husband’s previous wife. That information comes much later. You’d think that would be the plot, then, Andrea threatening the people around her or actively ordering hits on women getting too close to Tony. Naw, she just goes on vacation so Tony can hook up with her step-daughter.
I could not tell you what the point of Point of Terror was (alternate pun: Truly, this was a Disappoint of Terror). It’s neither titillating nor terrifying, just meandering along for 90 minutes until the end where he wakes up and it’s all been bullshit. Skip it.
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