Posted: 02/09/03
© 2002 Filmmonthly.com


Art of Revenge (2003)
by Hank Yuloff

In which our intrepid reviewer would have enjoyed less art and more revenge. Hell, any revenge would have been nice...
Someone must really have a grudge against me and is taking it out their revenge in a funny way by making me watch and review Art of Revenge.

Let's start with the direct-to-video CD cover. The description says: "When Matt leaves his wife Laura for younger, more beautiful woman after he becomes a successful musician, she vows to get revenge." That is the story line... Except he's an INTERIOR DESIGNER. Good God, they couldn't even get it right with their own film (Wait, to call it a film is to insult crappy movies like Pluto Nash, Blair Witch and the 8 other movies on my bottom 10 list for last year). On the cover, they even show Laura with a knife in her hand like she is going to Lorena Bobbitt the guy. Never happened. She only had a knife when she was making dinner. Come to think of it, a movie of anyone cooking dinner would have been more interesting.

So Matt's ex-wife hires Tuesday to "seduce and abandon" (slight Blazing Saddles reference here) Matt. She marries him, but then all of his business contacts find out that she has a criminal record and they dump him as their architect because if he didn't know she was a bad person, how can they trust him to make their shopping centers pretty. It's almost too unbearable to watch.

So who's in this tripe? Matt is played by Stephan Jenkins (Rock Star), a member of the musical group Third Eye Blind. Pardon the easy attack, but maybe he should have opened his two remaining eyes before reading the script and thinking he was an actor.

When I watching his wife, I kept thinking I had seen her before. I had. She was the hot little babe in the 1983 film Just One of the Guys. Yea, 1983. Long time between starring roles. Guess why.

The "temptress?" That's Nichole Hiltz. Yes, the one who blazed on the screen in Amazons and Gladiators and played "3rd Alien in Spandex" in Dude Where's My Car.

I guess I should have known. It had the first holy triumvirate of bad movies: It was written, directed and produced by the same person - and he was a first timer: Simon Gornick. Don't bother remembering that name, you won't see it again soon.

So why did I take this? The press release promised sex. I read that to be gratuitous nudity. Sorry. We get one quick underwear shot and that's as far as it goes.

To wrap up here: Bad acting. Weakest possible plot. No nudity. That's the SECOND holy triumvirate of bad movies. I don't think even USA Network would play this on a Wednesday night at 3 am. Look for this one to try and lure people to take it off the shelf of the video store. Fight the urge.

Hank Yuloff is an advertising guy in Los Angeles who likes a little T.N.A. with his bad scripts.