The result was a whole slew of ripe Melodrama movies loaded with familiar TV faces, including the immortal Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?, starring Tori Spelling. Meanwhile, The '90s also saw NBC revamp their Monday Night at the Movies series to appeal more to young women. Its success pushed them to make more movies. Lifetime itself got into the business with the 1990 movie Memories of Murder, starring Nancy Allen as a victim of Easy Amnesia who gets stalked by a deranged man. Hollywood studios even got into the act with films like Not Without My Daughter and Sleeping with the Enemy. Starting in The '80s, the major US networks added stories in this fashion to their Made-for-TV Movie lineups, and saw them get phenomenal ratings. Original movies are such a bedrock for the Lifetime brand that it has a spinoff network devoted entirely to them (LMN).ĭespite being the Trope Namer and Trope Codifier, Lifetime didn't invent the genre. The Trope Namer is Lifetime, a cable TV channel in the United States with programming geared toward female audiences (or, at least, female audiences who conform to Lifetime's conception of its target demographic), which is well known for giving rise to the subgenre. note L-R, top to bottom: Obsessed 2002, Enough, Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy, and The Burning Bed.Ī genre of Made for TV Movies, also known as "Women in Jeopardy," that feature similar plots and thematic elements - mainly aggrieved women and their struggles to find empowerment of one sort or another. For the Korean filmmakers, and the amazing cast.this is their master stroke.Showing that women have the power, one flick at a time. One flaw is that some might find the film a bit long in the tooth, but this is not to be missed for fans of serial killer thrillers and police procedural movies. The beauty is in the details, and this film, like all the great ones, revels in their uncovering. Witness the tiny executions of minutae: The cloth one rogue cop wraps around his boot so as not to leave scars when he kick-boxes suspects into submission, the harried chief of police checking his own blood pressure while trying to keep his off-the-cuff detectives in line or fighting to keep headline-starved reporters at bay, the young female officer desperately trying to showcase her abilities in crime solving between serving the chauvinistic detectives cups of fresh coffee, the outsider detective from Seoul's insistence that documents never lie (and the brutal irony at the climax that challenges his entire sense of being), and the main village detective's scathing speech on the difference between American FBI agents and Koren policemen. Finally, the character development: The small details revealing the haunted souls of the detectives on the case is nothing short of brilliant. This unique time and place serves as a wonderful respite from the typical American big-city setting of so many other films of this ilk. This is inspired by the true story of Korea's first publicized (and still unsolved) serial killer case. Second, the place: South Korea, circa the late 1980's, and apparently under some sort of militia rule. First, the mood: Haunting cinematography (rain falling on a small village at night, shadows darting across a thick field of grass, figures lurking in the woods, a masterfully choreographed hot pursuit scene on foot), a poignant music score (aided by the creepy use of a Korean pop song that accompanies each murder), and no-nonsense direction (peppered with fabulous doses of comic relief-how Shakespearan!) keep the film more and more intriguing at each turn and fascinating to watch. The filmmakers here craft a taut, careful, and delicately strung together motion picture that relishes in its amazing development of mood, place, and character. This is probably the best crime thriller I've seen since "Insomnia," and contains the most haunting climax of any serial killer flick since "Seven." But like most films reaching for greatness, this is most admirable for its striking details.
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