Kilmerthon: Blind Horizon (2003)

 

All Kilmerthon reviews are sorted under the label "Val Kilmer".

 

Out of 5:

Story: ⭐⭐⭐

Dialogue: ⭐⭐

Characters: ⭐⭐⭐

Visuals:⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Soul:⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Kilmer:⭐⭐⭐⭐

 

Watched Aug 2, 2024

I actually really enjoyed this movie, but part of me wonders if I’m just starved for movies with intentional design. I recently came off of a very high vitamin D prescription meant to amend a vitamin D deficiency. This movie felt like that prescription, going gloriously overboard in both visual and auditory departments. In a contemporary amateur cinema landscape that’s in love with run-and-gun filming and shooting on locations that require zero additional set decoration, this was a much-appreciated change of pace. (I fear for my future aspirations of being a production designer haha)

 

Blind Horizon, essentially, is Will Wemer’s Paris, Texas but with an assassination subplot. That’s what it is. A man found unconscious in the Texas dessert wakes up from a coma with amnesia and no memory of who he is, but he does have one strong conviction – someone is about to make an attempt at the president’s life. Constrained to the small town setting of Blackpoint, Val Kilmer’s character Frank attempts to figure out who he is while the sheriff attempts to put the pieces of Frank’s attempted murder together, slowly realizing that Frank’s fears might not be entirely unfounded.

 

Now, I loved Paris, Texas, so I’m down with a thriller rip-off. I was hoping to find some hidden gems in this endeavour and this may be one of them. And it seems like doctor/detective/agent characters are a recurring theme in Kilmer’s filmography so I guess I better develop a taste of this genre.

 

I think Sam Shepard and Noble Willington had good on-screen chemistry and their characters, especially Shepard's, offers a grounding element of normalcy when compared to the very destabilizing scenes told from Frank’s point of view. The sheriff stands in for the audience, and we're trying to figure out everything alongside him. I’ll always question the realism of a Columbo-esque cop who genuinely cares about doing his job right but hey, movies are for escapism.

 

The last act reveal/plot twist was not as complex as the flashbacks set it up to be, in my opinion. I love a movie that gives me a puzzle to solves, but I don’t think I was given particularly useful pieces – the relevancy of the pieces mostly came after the reveal of their punchlines.

 

As for Kilmer in this movie, I think he blended into the dusty landscape surprisingly well. He’s amnesiac throughout most of the movie and so carries this Little Boy Lost demeanour, which can either be done well or not well… I give his depiction a 5/10. Again, I feel Paris, Texas is a better example.

 

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. I’d stick my neck out for it. It didn’t bring a ton of new offerings to the table but at the very least, I found it memorable – I feel like these low budget efforts are often doomed by being super forgettable, a fate far worse than being “bad”, in my opinion. I have to give props to director Michael Haussman for taking his cool 5mil and trying to do something interesting with it. I feel like this is a rough gem.

 

Kilmerthon: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

NOTE: All future Kilmerthon reviews will be sorted under the label "Val Kilmer".

I regret not recording my thoughts back when I was watching all those Baldwin movies so, as long as I've got a similar fascination with Val Kilmer, I'm gonna try to do that, even if they're fairly brief and marred by my own personal biases.

Out of 5:

Story:⭐⭐

Dialogue:⭐

Characters: ⭐⭐

Visuals:⭐⭐⭐

Soul:⭐

Kilmer:⭐⭐⭐

 

This film is the epitome of not giving a damn. As a furry I came into it with an open mind - H.G. Wells' novel is arguably one of the first pieces of furry literature, so as a furry I hoped I'd be able to glean something from it.

I'm not good with movie analysis so I'll just give my thoughts straight up:

I'm honestly not sure what tone they were going for. If they were going for grindhouse I think they muddied it with an attempted sympathetic protagonist and romance subplot. The costumes were actually pretty good but not good enough to warrant a viewing based on that alone. Everything else besides the visuals felt woefully underbaked. Like, oozing raw batter underbaked. I could see attempts at deeper character development, but they were never committed to. The biggest problem in terms of story, I feel, is that this narrative demands at least a little introspection - Wells' novel is ultimately an allegory for the cruelty of humankind, but the movie approaches the subject matter in the most shallow terms possible (mutants with machine guns). So yeah. Even as a furry, I was not a huge fan.

 

Was this movie worth it to a fan of Val Kilmer? Sure. He does not give a fuck here and as a result I think a decent amount of his true arrogant self shines through under the crappy dialogue, which at the very least gives the film a bit of energy. There was also this weird sexual tension between Montgomery and Douglas during the first half that worked well as a set of jangling keys to get me through some of the more grating moments.

I'm unreasonably empathetic and often feel bad for good actors stuck in crappy roles but Val looked like he was making the best out of a crumby situation. His character was high for most of his final act but part of me wonders if that wasn't get Val using the excuse of method acting to make the process a bit less painful.

There's a scene 54 minutes in that I Christened The Only Good 30 Seconds In This Movie where a shirtless Kilmer with a flask and walkman tucked into his shorts gives David Thewlis a nice view of his junk while smoking a blunt and admitting he's had sex with a pig lady.

I haven't really done much research into production issues so I can't tell you what went down with any certainty, but I imagine the rocky production contributed to the downer vibe of this movie and my incredibly low SOUL rating. This is the movie that convinced me that my personal Movie Soul rating should be a quantifiable rating in all my future reviews.

Movies either feel soulful or soulless to me. Movies are a medium inherently tied to humanity - they are works of humanity reflecting back how we view ourselves in times of crisis and peace. The SOUL rating is not neccisarily a rating of how humanistic a given movie is, but rather, if it attempts to say something considered about humanity and if that was one of the main driving factors behind the story.

That's very convoluted and probably makes no sense. It's a gut feeling, It's a measure of whether or not a movie leaves me feeling empty inside. And this one did.

 

This movie was a sad orgasm achieved via some particularly shameful pornography. It got there in the end but nobody's happier for it.

If nothing else, I would love to give the original novel a read myself and see if I can't propose a better script. Time After Time (1979), a loose sci-fi adaptation of Wells' The Time Machine, is absolutely adorable and one of my favourite 70s movies, so a successful Wells adaptation is within the realm of possibility. But this one ain't it.