Landslide Reviews

A painfully bad, melodramatic thriller, LANDSLIDE bears all the hallmarks of a direct-to-video quickie: a couple of minor Hollywood stars-for-hire sleepwalking through their parts, multinational financing and a shoddy screenplay. Bob Boyd (Anthony Edwards) is an amnesiac from a near-fatal car wreck. A geologist, he is hired by the Matterson Timber & Mining Company to survey its land, which abuts an unstable dam and property owned by its enemy, the Trinivant family. Despite Bob's report that the dam sits on shaky ground, Howard (Tom Burlinson), the evil son of powerful local patriarch Bull Matterson, plans to continue with his project and flood the land belonging to Clair Trinivant (Melody Anderson). Bob becomes drawn into the power struggle and gradually realizes that the past he can not remember ties him to the feud. Local journalist Mac informs Bob that Claire is the widow of Frank, the son of Matterson's deceased partner John Trinivant. Ten years earlier, both men were reportedly killed in a fiery car crash, along with a mysterious "third man" hitchhiker, Robert Grant. Bob begins to suspect that his crash and the Trinivants' were one and the same. Mac suggests foul play by the Mattersons. Bob decides to investigate in an attempt to discover his own identity, interfering with Howard's nefarious business plans along the way. Before long he's become romantically involved with both Claire and Howard's sister Lucy (Joanna Cassidy). The Mattersons try to convince him he is really Grant and a victim of Claire's sabotage. But Bob takes Claire's side, as he begins to think he may be her husband Frank. Conflicts come to a head as the dam begins to collapse, setting off a giant landslide. Bull Matterson suffers a spontaneous heart attack upon realizing that it was Frank who survived the wreck. In revenge, Howard, Lucy and their gun thugs hunt down Mac, Claire and Bob/Frank. The amnesiac hero escapes the manhunt to hear a deathbed confession by Bull and his honest partner Fred Donner. As the town is engulfed by the landslide, Frank rescues Claire, while the evil Howard is killed by the disaster he created. Although nominally an action-thriller, LANDSLIDE spends most of its time having its hopelessly confused and confusing characters sort out their identities and relationships to one another. The central plot device--amnesia--is straight out of the worst of soap operas, but its dialogue and character motivations never fulfill even that low level of artfulness. Anthony Edwards is absolutely wooden as the leading man who bumbles through a series of unmotivated, poorly explained confrontations with the warring families. Is he Bob Boyd? Richard Grant? Robert Boyd Grant? Or Frank Trinivant? He is never quite sure. Neither are any of the other characters. And neither were the screenwriter or director. Nor are we. At times the poorly thought out twists and confusing turns in the storyline are ludicrous enough to be unintentionally comical, as when Bob confronts old man Matterson with the question, "What if I'm Frank Trinivant?" to which Bull unexpectedly responds by clutching his heart and falling to the ground with all the histrionics of a Gilded Age thespian. The dialogue and narrative exposition sometimes rise to this comical status: "Why weren't you in a car wreck with your husband?" a suspicious Bob asks Claire. "I wanted to go, but ... I had a cold!" she explains. For the most part, however, LANDSLIDE merely offers an avalanche of unconvincing plot developments and undramatic, unbelievable dialogue. Somewhere amid the identity reversals, family business power plays and lumber mills (set in the Canadian northwest, the film was also shot in the Yugoslavian republics of Croatia and Slovenia) there seems to be some attempt to exploit David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" TV series, but any similiar sense of style, humor or mystery is absent. Surprisingly, the Croatian crew's low-budget special effects and miniatures in the film's disaster climax are executed in a fairly convincing manner though this comes as small comfort after the disastrous attempts at drama that precede it. (Violence, profanity, sexual situations.)