Letter from Death Row Reviews

Bret Michaels, best known as the lead singer for heavy metal band Poison, financed, scripted, codirected and stars in this psychological profile of a convict on death row. In a clear bid to prove that there's indeed life after rock stardom, Michaels simply succeeds in coming up with another hackneyed straight-to-video drama. A stripper named Kristi (Kristi Gibson) is attacked in her home by a masked rapist; the culprit is actually her boyfriend, Michael Raine (Bret Michaels), and the "rape" is a actually sex-game played by the couple. The event is captured by a video camera, however, and when Kristi is killed by another intruder a few moments later, the tape is used as evidence to convict Raine on a murder charge. He's sentenced to death in the Tennessee State Prison. While on Death Row, Raine is visited by the Governor's assistant Jessica Foster (Lorelei Shellist), to whom he tells his story. After his head is shaved by the sadistic warden, Raine begins to snap from the pressure. Meanwhile, inmate-priest Lucifer T. Powers (Drew Boe), confides that after the Governor confessed to him about having an affair with a hooker, Powers was framed with a murder charge. Explaining matters once and for all, Raine gets a letter from his lawyer, who is suddering a bout of conscience. It seems the lawyer was in on the fact that Raine's murder charge was set up by the Governor's office; the violently jealous Jessica was in fact responsible for Kristi's murder (since Kristi was the Governor's hooker). With Jessica arrested, Raine is released from jail...but in the end, all that has happened (after the killing of Kristi and the imprisonment of Raines) is shown to have been the product of a faceless scriptwriter who's been controlling Raine's destiny. A babbling wreck, Raine is led to the electric chair.... Aside from Michaels's evident ambition to break out of the rock-star mold and an effective Nashville prison backdrop, there is very, very little to distinguish A LETTER FROM DEATH ROW. What starts as a hallucinogenic look at crime and punishment (think NATURAL BORN KILLERS on a shoestring budget) quickly degenerates into a cliche-ridden experiment in suspense, including elements familiar from the prison subgenre (mistreatment by guards and an escape attempt) and other erotically tinged thrillers (the unmasking of a spurned woman as the puppetmaster). Unfocused and illogical, the film attempts to redeem itself with a last-minute plot twist--but even that's been hinted at from the beginning, as the faceless scriptwriter--who may or may not be Michaels himself--is seen (from oblique angles) reading along with the story line throughout the film. Michaels's pal Charlie Sheen makes a cameo appearance (and after completion, bought 40 percent of the movie), while his father Martin shows up for a two-minute sequence as Raine's blue-collar father. The remainder of the performances are all either amateurish or overwrought (no surprise given that Michaels once stated that his favorite actresses included Jami Gertz and Brigitte Nielsen). Michaels himself is serviceable in the lead, and while he may be bald for most of the movie, clearly wants viewers to remember his stint as a Playgirl cover-boy (August 1993) since he wastes no opportunity to show off his buff body. It should be noted that, given Michaels's subsequent real-life troubles concerning a publically-marketed home-video of him and ex-girlfriend Pamela Lee Anderson having sex, that the early sequences of DEATH ROW obviously didn't require much of a stretch of Michaels's imagination. (Violence, nudity, sexual situations, adult situations, extreme profanity.)