Identity (2003)
Directed by James Mangold
Complete strangers stranded at a remote desert motel during a raging storm soon find themselves the target of a deranged murderer. As their numbers thin out, the travelers begin to turn on each other, as each tries to figure out who the killer is.
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This slick production under the helm of James Mangold is Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" mixed with Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho."
Have you ever seen one of the many versions of Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians," in which a group of strangers are brought together in an out-of-the-way location and terrorized by an unseen murderer?
A clever combination of opposing sensibilities Agatha Christie ( Ten Little Indians ) and Friday the 13th Identity is the kind of B-movie that Hollywood cant make enough of these days, and its a darned shame.
Although "Identity" boasts a talented cast that fleshes out its characters to an uncommon degree for what is ostensibly just a fancy slasher flick, screenwriter Michael Cooney (scribe of the "Jack Frost" cult-horror pictures) lifts the motel part of the plot almost wholesale from Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians."
That, of course, would be Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians," which has provided the template for hundreds of secret-killer movies good and bad.
In a dangerous gambit, screenwriter Michael Cooney actually has one of the characters mention the resemblance of this situation to Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" (the movie adaptation, of course, not the novel).
Writer Michael Cooney ("Jack Frost") uses the single location thriller format of "Ten Little Indians" to pay homage to "Psycho" with a twist on that film's psychiatric underpinnings while director James Mangold ("Heavy," "Kate & Leopold") keeps the action barreling forward, roving about the limited confines of a desolate motel with flair.
Identity seems at first to be a cross between Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None and Alfred Hitchcock 's Psycho but then twists into something even more surprising.
Not since "Psycho" has a motel provided the setting for such terror and helpnessness in the face of an unseen, rampant killer.
But instead of being shocked, we have to muster the energy to roll our eyes at the solution doled out in one of those serious psychological lectures, a device that was cornball when Hitchcock resorted to it in the otherwise brilliant "Psycho."
But, even as its end credits are in sight, the movie does a huge turnaround to become a horror version of "Six Characters in Search of an Author" -- and a homage to Hitchcock's "Psycho."
A touch of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is present, but the similarities are minimal.
Identity seems at first to be a cross between Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None and Alfred Hitchcock 's Psycho but then twists into something even more surprising.
The whole premise of 10 people stranded in an isolated location during a thunderstorm is a classic horror setup (think The Cat and the Canary or The Old Dark House), and having them killed off one by one by a mysterious killer is both classic horror and classic Agatha Christie (And Then There Were None).
Written by Michael Cooney (Jack Frost) and directed by James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted, Kate & Leopold) the film is tightly and cleverly constructed -- both in the way that it follows the And Then There Were None motif and in the way it does not drop the ball in the final minutes, as many horror films do (even last year's above-average Below suffered from a poor ending).
And a lot happens in "Identity": This is a movie in the mold of Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None," except that the killings, once they start, seem to trigger an avalanche of death.
Much like Agatha Christie's classic murder mystery And Then There Were None , a book made into a movie five times, the latter four with the title Ten Little Indians , Identity slowly kills off its characters and reserves the identity of the killer until the cruel end.
(I felt like Groucho Marx in The Big Store saying, "I told you in the first reel he was a crook," when my early pronouncement of who the killer was proved on the money.)
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Writer Michael Cooney ("Jack Frost") uses the single location thriller format of "Ten Little Indians" to pay homage to "Psycho" with a twist on that film's psychiatric underpinnings while director James Mangold ("Heavy," "Kate & Leopold") keeps the action barreling forward, roving about the limited confines of a desolate motel with flair.
And screenwriter Michael Cooney is also responsible for the odious and terrifying Jack Frost , which may be a first for a screenwriter: He wrote a comedy that was horrifyingly bad, and now, a horror movie that's hilariously awful.
Considering that screenwriter Michael Cooney was responsible (as both writer and director) for Jack Frost and Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman, Identity's genre roots are probably inescapable.
We can blame writer Michael Cooney, the man responsible for writing and directing "Jack Frost" and "Jack Frost 2," you know, the straight to video horror films about a killer snowman, for the mess called "Identity."
Although "Identity" boasts a talented cast that fleshes out its characters to an uncommon degree for what is ostensibly just a fancy slasher flick, screenwriter Michael Cooney (scribe of the "Jack Frost" cult-horror pictures) lifts the motel part of the plot almost wholesale from Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians."
Written by Michael Cooney (Jack Frost) and directed by James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted, Kate & Leopold) the film is tightly and cleverly constructed -- both in the way that it follows the And Then There Were None motif and in the way it does not drop the ball in the final minutes, as many horror films do (even last year's above-average Below suffered from a poor ending).
The casting of '80s sub-icon Rebecca De Mornay (one time Gilbert and Sullivan-addicted psycho in the career-killing The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) as a bitchy, has-been movie star with "first victim" written all over her suggests he was as does the constant barrage of thunder-and-lightning atmospherics and the enjoyable over-the-top playing of the cast.
The film also features John Hawkes (A Perfect Storm, Rush Hour, From Dusk Till Dawn), Amanda Peet (Igby Goes Down, Changing Lanes, The Whole Nine Yards), Alfred Molina (Murder on the Orient Express, Frida, Magnolia ), John C. McGinley (Stealing Harvard, Any Given Sunday, Scrubs), Jake Busey (Starship Troopers, Contact, The Frighteners), William Lee Scott (Gattaca, October Sky, Gone in Sixty Seconds), Clea DuVall (Girl, Interrupted, But I'm a Cheerleader, She's All That), and a very bitchy Rebecca De Mornay (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Backdraft, The Trip to Bountiful) to remind us that she's still a star.
In the press kit for the film, the director invokes titles like Hitchcock's Rear Window and Ridley Scott's Alien (and there's nothing wrong with that); but it's impossible not to note that the one film directly quoted within film itself is the somewhat less respectable My Bloody Valentine.
Writer Michael Cooney ("Jack Frost") uses the single location thriller format of "Ten Little Indians" to pay homage to "Psycho" with a twist on that film's psychiatric underpinnings while director James Mangold ("Heavy," "Kate & Leopold") keeps the action barreling forward, roving about the limited confines of a desolate motel with flair.
He started his career with the excellent indie-art film "Heavy," then went more commercial with the portentous "Copland," then went downright kitschy in "Girl, Interrupted," which promptly interrupted my interest in his work.
Vince starred in "Heavy," Mangold's lovely directorial debut about a road-side diner romance, but he uses those restless eyes of his to turn in a rote freak-show performance here.
But Identity, written by Michael Cooney and directed by James Mangold (who made the impeccable Heavy, the ambitious Cop Land, the dismal Kate & Leopold, along with Angelina Jolie's vehicle to brother-kissing Oscars stardom, Girl, Interrupted), has some okay cards up its sleeve.
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As Cooney's story unfolds, however, it becomes increasingly apparent that for "Identity" to work, the writer is going to have to come up with a tremendous payoff along the lines of "The Sixth Sense" or "The Usual Suspects."
"The Sixth Sense" and "The Usual Suspects" definitely upped the ante for modern plot twists.
As the film progresses, it transforms itself into an anomalous combination of The Sixth Sense , Fight Club and The Silence of the Lambs.
Then, like many, many movies since "The Sixth Sense" -- surely the most structurally influential movie of the past decade -- it suddenly shifts gears to be ... well, something different, and a bit more ambitious.
While it will blindside some viewers, it isn't quite of the knock-your-socks-off variety as was the case with "The Sixth Sense."
It has been pointed out to me that Michael Cooney did not, in fact, write the crappy 1998 comedy Jack Frost -- he wrote the crappy 1996 thriller Jack Frost.
While Cooneys previous output has not been spectacular (probably his best-known work so far was 1997s snowman-gone-wrong thriller Jack Frost), this script is deceptively clever, revealing its depth only after masquerading as a run-of-the-mill slasher story for the first couple of reels with only Mangolds clever pacing and mixed-up timeline to distinguish it.