FINDERS KEEPERS (2014)

I don’t always research a film I’ve not heard of before reviewing. I find that if I know too much up front it could influence my opinion of the film so I’ll make a point of avoiding anything about it. The reason that, at the time of viewing, that I decided to grab this movie on Bluray was due to mainly two things: Jaime Pressly, whom I’ve alway had a bit of a bitchy-high-school-girl-who’d-spit-on-me-rather-than-talk-to-me crush on, and Tobin Bell… the Jigsaw Killer himself: how could I resist them.

What I found out afterwards was that in the few months that I’d taken break from writing for Digital Retribution, I’d become a rube. Not only had these two names influenced my purchase, but I’d spent good money on a ten year old, made for TV film.

Sigh. I’ve lost my edge.

Too many Marvel and DC films have dulled my keen mind.

Finders Keepers starts with a flashback to a boy, possessed by something, and OBVIOUSLY possessed as his eyes are completely black, on a killing spree… flash forward to now, when young recently separated single mum, Alyson Simon (Jaime Pressly) and her daughter, Claire (Kylie Rogers) move to a small country town and into an unfeasibly big house for whatever wage a single mum is pulling from seemingly doing nothing.

Since the separation, though, Claire has become reserved and introverted, and not even kindly psychologist Dr Freeman (Tobin Bell) can help her, especially considering her entire being seems to be focused on an ugly toy doll that she found in the house.

Fairly quickly, weird things start happening, like crazy cat lady Janine (Marina Sirtis) find her cats killed in her back yard, and Claire violently freaks out whenever she is separated from the doll, and not even help from her dad, and script-driven white knight, Jonathon Simon (Patrick Muldoon) can save the day.

Things escalate quickly as the film only goes for a thankfully brief 98 minutes, but who will survive? How will the police excuse the fact that it seems that a single mum is beating her child and that a child seems to be committing murder?

Only the Syfy network can answer those questions…

So as you can see by the plot synopsis, the only thing that this film brings to the table is… um… I guess, absolutely nothing. Stock standard ‘doll possession’ movie that is so cookie cutter I’m surprised it’s not made by Arnotts.

That’s not the REALLY awful thing about it though. The script is what a B movie fan would expect, as is the plot, but if you want to talk about miscasting, this film is a TED Talk on it. Jaime Pressly is wonderful, in anything else. In this, she swans around looking spectacular and not at all like a caring mother concerned for her child. Patrick Muldoon feels like he’s not playing a estranged dad role, but instead is playing Kevin Bacon, playing an estranged dad role. Tobin Bell as the psychologist, and this may be a typecast thing, seems like a murderer posing as a doctor, which would have been an amazing plot twist! Finally, Marina Sirtis as the crazy street cat-lady must have been identified as unconvincing during the script run-through as her obsession is more based around all the ‘cat’ icons in her house rather than her performance.

What is the real shame is that Rogers, as the daughter, is the only one convincing in this whole debacle. She holds her own quite well whilst the rest of the cast wander around wearing the shoes of people who didn’t get cast. Honestly, Muldoon would have been better as the doctor so at least their could have been some temptation for Pressly’s character in the town rather than an old guy who sounds like he has a sex dungeon and the bedside manner of an undertaker.

I’ve decided that what I am going to do with this film is bury it in the floorboards of my house, so in many years time when a new family come in, or a single mum with her daughter, one of them will find it and they’ll hunt down one of those old ‘Bluray player’ things and get obsessed by it…

… though I’m pretty sure they just cry out ‘what the hell is this crap’ and rebury it like the stale old bone that it is.

Extras: No extras on this Bluray.