Well, I can sincerely say that this film was not the worst thing to come out of 2001. For the first eight months of the year, though, Heart of Stone had to be in the running. A stupid movie made for stupid people, this pitiful attempt at a thriller boasts an "R" rating and 4 separate sex scenes with Angie Everhart, yet she doesn't even go topless in any of them. Do I need to say any more than that? This thing was made many years, many flops and many bad performances after Everhart's unexpected star turn in Jade and these filmmakers still making her the star of their production without requiring her to show some skin perfectly demonstrates that they didn't know what the *bleep* they were doing. This is the sort of poorly executed nonsense that makes you think "James Wilder deserves better than this". James Wilder, for gosh sakes.
Right out the gate, the audio quality of this motion picture is garbage. Given the technology available in 2001, forget about today, that's a totally inexcusable flaw. The soundtrack is clear but all the dialog is muddy and muddled, like the actors are talking through a thick cloth. How did someone not notice that after the first day on set? Was the sound guy connected to the mob or something? It's so bad that having a bunch of Welsh street urchins redub everyone's lines would have been an improvement.
Mary Sanders (Angie Everhart) is married to a rich, impotent doctor (Peter J. Lucas ) and has a daughter (Tracy Ovist) just heading off to college. Mary becomes the obsession of a clearly disturbed man (James Wilder) who seduces her once and then refuses to leave her alone. Meanwhile, a serial killer is slaying young co-eds in an inexplicably involved manner. He kidnaps them, lets them think they've escaped and then slays them. The killer is being pursued by an even more inexplicable quartet of cops. I mean, I understand the two lead cops (Gregor Toerzs and Joel Bissonnette). I don't understand why you'd ever cast someone with Gregor Toerzs' German accent in this kind of role, but if you've got a murder it only makes sense to have the police show up in the story. But why are there two more cops (Scott Mckinlay and Vince Marinelli)? They're in several scenes. They've even got actual names that are spoken aloud. But they are completely superfluous. Heart of Stone was never going to be, you know, good or anything, but the first thing anyone with half a brain would have done after reading the script once is eliminate those two extra, awkward and unnecessary roles.
The authorities come to suspect Mary's stalker of being the killer, so he coerces her into providing him with an alibi. Mary tries to get him to back off by sending her husband's most inexplicable brother (John Duerler) to rough him up. I say "most inexplicable" because Peter J. Lucas has an unmistakable European accent. It's not quite as bad as Toerzs', but there's no way he can pass for your average American. John Duerler has no accent at all and there's no effort made to explain the difference. I first I thought the relationship was that Mary was sister to the wife of Duerler's character, but that wasn't it. Forget about the fact that Lucas and Duerler look about as much alike as Dick Cheney and Kanye West. Forget about the fact their characters have as much in common as Mr. Rogers and Jack the Ripper. How in the name of Mel Blanc did these filmmakers not at least tell Duerler to cop some sort of accent like Lucas'?
Anyway, the attempt to scare him off fails and Mary's stalker winds up kidnapping her daughter. The cops uncover evidence that the killer is the stalker and rush in to save the day. But wait! Can you believe the killer is someone else? Clearly, the folks who made Heart of Stone believed they were really throwing the audience a curve with that one but they were sadly, pathetically wrong. Your average house fly could figure out who the killer is before this film is 15 minutes old.
There are a couple of naked boobs here and Wilder does an okay job with a horribly written part. That's all Heart of Stone has going for it. From atrocious sound to hideous plotting to camera work so amateurish it looks like they could only afford to do one take and had to use it no matter how bad it was, "thoroughgoing disaster" is too kind for this film. Don't even think about watching it.
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