The Lost Angel (DVD)

Written, directed and produced by Dimitri Logothetis, the story opens with appallingly cheap-looking GCI blood drops that lead to the drain of a gore-soaked bathtub. Merrily cleaning up the mess is, presumably, the bad guy. The cops burst in, and shoot him in the leg. He goes down, but not before setting fire to the crime scene. (And we haven’t seen the last of him…)

Cut to said peace officers sitting around a bar, reminiscing about the cold cases of a serial killer who’s mysteriously left the scene for some 20 years. Billie (Alison Eastwood), Julian (Nicholas Celozzi) and Banks (Neville Edwards) are baffled by the psycho’s disappearance, but they soon learn that he’s back (with a vengeance, naturally) and is stalking and kidnapping women from the local church. Employing the assistance of priest/FBI agent Father Brian (Judd Nelson) and the church’s deaf leader, Father Kevin (John Rhys-Davies), the detectives start on the hunt for the sadistic killer who likes to leave taunting messages in dead languages.

If Mystery Science Theatre 3000 were still being produced, The Lost Angel would be an excellent candidate for some good-natured heckling. I even found myself responding to lines such as, “What do you want?” with answers like, “My acting coach!” While the cinematography is good and the script is reasonable, they’re undermined by shoddy editing and even worse direction. Eastwood’s performance is all over the place, and at times she even seems to be channeling William Shatner from the Star Trek TV series days.

The editing is perhaps the film’s most unforgivable sin: There are several places where, clearly, the actors in the same scene were filmed separately and the cobbled edits that try to fool our eyes into believing the people are together fail miserably. I’ve seen better in old episodes of Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie when the “twin” Samanthas or Jeannies are supposed to be talking to each other.

There is a supposed-to-be-tense interrogation scene which hilariously pits a gun-toting Eastwood against a goth-guru (C. Thomas Howell, with a seemingly endless supply of eyeliner). In full view of her colleagues, she forces the suspect to strip naked, then she straddles him, pistol to his temple, and demands that he get “hard” for her. Of course, he shrivels into a sobbing heap of spineless blubber — hey, who can blame the flaccid Howell? I’m sure it’s not easy to get excited once you’ve seen the dailies on this stinker.

This is not to say that The Lost Angel is a totally lost cause — it all depends on how you look at “entertainment”. If the movie doesn’t cost you anything to watch and you have nothing better to do, then you might want to give it a peek. But if you demand quality on more than one or two levels, change the channel and pray.

Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson