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Overall Rating : 2/10
Directed By : Hayley Cloake
Melissa Keller (Drop Dead Sexy)
Brian Austin Green (Beverly Hills, 90210 (TV) )
Kayla Ewell (Senior Skip Day)
Linden Ashby (Resident Evil: Extinction)
Supplied By : Sony Pictures
Film Reviewed By : Rick L. Blalock
Date Reviewed : June. 25, 2008
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| PLOT The only thing that Kelly Reyes has ever thought about was playing beach volleyball. Until one day when a mysterious reporter named Holden comes into her life and strange events start to happen to her as well as the people around her. As Kelly becomes skeptical of Holden she must maintain focus on what has always been essential to her and play beach volleyball at her highest level. Is she being paranoid or is there something darker to this mystery man? | ||||
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| THE REVIEW In IMPACT POINT, the night that she loses a crucial semi-finals match, pro beach Volleyball player Kelly Reyes meets a handsome stranger named Holden Greg. Kelly recognizes his name as that of a famous Basketball columnist. Holden explains that despite coving basketball the majority of the time, he is a lover of all sports, and that he has an interest in interviewing Kelly. As fate would have it, the interview becomes a little more and turns into a budding love affair between the two. At first Holden is a gentle caring man in Kelly's eyes but things take a drastic turn when one of the members of the team that beat Kelly and her partner in the semi-finals turns up dead. After the event, Holden unexpectedly vanishes from sight, and during the Police investigation into the player's death the reason why is made abundantly clear when they inform Kelly that the name "Holden Greg" belongs to a man, whose disappearance they are also investigating. It isn't long before the man that Kelly only knows as Holden begins to harass her and everyone around her with both psychical and verbal harm. When he threatens to kill her on live television during the championship game in which she is replacing the deceased player, Kelly and the Police force find out that the danger was right under their noses all along. IMPACT POINT is one of those films that you are more likely to see while channel surfing cable television stations in the wee hours of the morning. IMPACT POINT presents itself as a sexy mystery thriller centered around the sport of Volleyball. The setup is simple and very familiar to us all, as it has been done time and time again, except for the obvious alterations in characters and the story in which they are part of. In this particular spin on the "stranger comes into the life of a young woman, only to be revealed as a psycho" brand of film, it's a young beach Volleyball player falling for a lunatic that is pretending to be a well-known sports writer. Truly, IMPACT POINT has got to be one of the blandest of its kind(at least from all the ones that i've seen), as it offers very little in the smarts department, and is, in every sense of the word, a "no-brainier". I say this because, there is not one moment during this film, that you have to actually stop and think about it's plot.....everything here is basically handed to the viewer. The are no twists to keep us guessing, nor is there any sub-plots to hide the moments of the film that are meant to shock us - in some instances you can do much as blink and miss something here that was meant to be clever. So to some it up in short term, we know that Brian Austin Green's character is the killer from the very beginning, and there are no "road blocks" of any sort thrown our way that would have us potentially guessing that it would be someone else.....what's the fun in that, I ask? So again, in other words, this mystery is no mystery at all. Besides being the pseudo mystery that it is, this film also fails when thing to scare and shock as I hinted at earlier. Even though this film is rated R, it's suspense would easily fit within the safe confines of a cable TV suspense series, come to think of it, IMPACT POINT's R rating probably lies within a couple of nude scenes offered up by the film's star Melissa Keller, and nothing more. Essentially, IMPACT POINT tries to be a thriller that it is not - an angry man stalking an innocent female victim in various scenes that are clouded with booming suspenseful music that makes the whole thing seem scarier than it really is......why am I having visions of an episode of SILK STOCKINGS? It's probably because it's all of the same genetic formula. Perhaps the plot would've worked a little better had the acting been more been more believable. IMPACT POINT features former BEVERLY HILLS 90210's David Silver himself, Brian Austin Green as a maniacal killer. Now let's be honest, Brian Austin Green as a killer is about as believable a killer that 'Body By Jake"'s Jake Jake Steinfeld was in 1981's Thanksgiving slasher, HOME SWEET HOME - anyone who's seen that film, knows just how god awful he was in that. Making Green the killer here basically makes his character the focal point of the film, so when the guy has a weak performance, the entire film will suffer, and in my opinion, that is more or less what we have in the case of impact point. I feel kind of bad for Green, I respect the guy for what he has done in the past, but these days when someone thinks Brian Austin Green, they no longer think about Beverly Hills 90210, but instead they think of his incredibly attractive and talented girlfriend Megan Fox(TRANSFORMERS)- whose star is undeniable on the rise. In this film the plot focuses equally on the subject of Volleyball, and it's more than obvious that the film is sponsored by the Association of Volleyball Professionals(or AVP), as their logo is seen virtually everywhere. As for the Volleyball action featured here, it isn't that intriguing, it seems to be the less important element of the story, it it feels that way - the only thing interesting about it are the numerous closeups of the players' backsides while they are giving signals to their partners. It's kind of disappointing that their is very little to remember about this film, but it's even more sad when these signal scenes are the most memorable. |
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| GORE
METER 2/10 A bloody face, a few gunshots and a stabbing......nothing major. |
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| MUSICAL
SCORE 3/10 Lots of generic electric sounding tracks for the most part. |
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| OVERALL
IMPRESSION OF THE FILM Overall, IMPACT POINT is a film that is very similar to others and brings nothing new to the table. I expected that maybe i'd get a nice little suspense thriller from this judging by it's trailer, but the truth is, the script just doesn't have enough depth, as everything that the film potentially has to offer, it gives it away too easily and to soon. Sure, female stars Melissa Keller(Kelly) and Kayla Ewell(Jen) are nice to look at and fare decently with what they have to work with here, but in my opinion it's just not enough to save this film from being one that is very unmemorable. This DVD will be released on July 1, 2008 |
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