Curiosity Kills (1990 TV Movie) User Reviews (3)

A predictable and obvious film that is like a really poor photocopy of a better picture

[bob the moo · 19 October 2004]

Cat Thomas (yes, really) is a struggling artist who has no real ambition to really aspire to much. He works as the maintenance guy for the run down building that he lives in – a job that he claims is more of an ongoing adventure than anything else but at least it pays the bills. His model girlfriend wants him to move with her to a new apartment in Malibu but he is unsure of such a big step. When one of the tenants commits suicide, Cat blames himself but sets around making the room ready for the new tenant, one Mr Michael Manus. After overhearing a message where a caller congratulates Manus on freeing up the apartment he needed, Cat suspects that Manus may have had a hand in the 'suicide' and joins with neighbour Jane to find out what he is up to.

When I taped this film I checked on IMDb to see what it was about. Given that the page had few reviews, no plot summary and only some character names, I figured that I had either stumbled onto a forgotten gem of a movie or a dog so poor that only a handful of people had bothered to give it a try and none had bothered to add to IMDb. Looking back now, the cast list really should have given me a clue that it would be the latter and not the former. The film opens with an unsuccessful hit on Falco – a key witness in the trial of drug kingpin Ruben Maize. This scene is shortly followed by a scene where Cat's neighbour 'kills himself' and a mysterious new tenant takes his room right away causing Cat to follow him around. Now, I'm not going to post spoilers in this review, but if you can't basically guess the rest of the plot from these first few scenes then you are very naïve or I have seen too many movies (or maybe both). The film continues this plot with very little effort, pretty much taking the predictable line all the way to the inevitable conclusion.

Even in the characters is everything obvious – Cat is dating professional model Gwen but hangs around with fellow artist and professional flirt Jane. It is so apparent that Cat and Gwen have so little in common that you wonder how they ever managed to get past the first date, never mind actually live together. Also it is so apparent that Cat and Jane are perfectly compatible that it is only a matter of time before they get it on (perhaps in a midnight, semi-lit, love scene with a flash of T&A while jazz plays in the background?). In even these side issues the film just plods ahead without doing anything different or interesting. The directing is flat and uninspiring – every frame screams 'TV movie', which in fairness is what it is.

The cast continue to fit into the tv movie standard that the film is aiming for, featuring as it does a collection of actors whose very presence confirms that you are not sitting in a cinema watching the big summer movie of that year. Generally I don't think that Howell is any good at all and is responsible for some of the worst pieces of tat I've seen, and so it is the case here even if he is not as bad as he could have been, his character is pretty obvious and he never brings anything to it. Fahey is his usual low rent self in an obvious role and he doesn't do anything other than smile and act normal for the majority of the film before then becoming a sinister killer all dressed in black, not to mention a laughably poor 'master of disguise'. Personally I do like Chong and here she is light and flirty in a way that added at least a little spark to the dull movie, she isn't any good but at least she is quite fun. Cox's presence is only one of a curio now that Friends has made her a star, but suffice to say she is poor here and just adds nothing to the film. The presence of Guilfoyle only adds the humour value of seeing him in such a silly role when many of us will know him for CSI.

Overall this is an obvious and basic thriller that goes exactly where you know it will and has been done better in many other films. The script is predictable and weak, the characters obvious (whether it be 'mysterious neighbour', 'incompatible girlfriend' or 'close female friend') and the cast do nothing to raise the material or add value (although Chong is always pretty cute). Not a hidden gem after all then, just a sub par TVM that has nothing new in it and only aspires to copy better films.

Likable actors but weak story and amateurish storytelling

[mysteriesfan · 3/10 · 22 April 2007]

With Rear Window back in the news following the release of the new movie Disturbia, and with Courtney Cox (Friends) and Paul Guilfoyle (CSI) in the cast (albeit in bit parts), maybe the 1990 TV movie Curiosity Kills will come to someone's attention. The actors -- C. Thomas Howell, Rae Dawn Chong, Jeff Fahey, Cox, and Guilfoyle -- are likable. There is some slight definition to their characters and setting (least so with Fahey's character, who turns on a dime from ditzy to maniacal). The main problem is the film's amateurish, thin, far-fetched story and story-telling. It has all the elements of a bad, low-budget cable TV "thriller." Despite how it is marketed, it is silly to say this movie has anything in common with Rear Window. Although I try not to give away plots in reviews, this one is so simplistic and obvious that it makes it hard. So be forewarned.

The movie opens with a violent scene (with cheap, unconvincing special effects) in which all of the police guards of a drug informant are shot to death, only to have the informant himself kill the hit-man. The scene then shifts to a run-down, warehouse-looking apartment building in a bad neighborhood in which Howell, a starving-artist photographer, works as the janitor for sleazy, quick-buck absentee landlord Guilfoyle, who appears briefly in the movie, wearing a leather jacket and driving a motorcycle. Howell's neighbor, Chong, is a starving-artist sculptor. Although the film never explains it, he has a girlfriend (Cox) who is a successful model and wants him to switch to commercial photography and move with her to a fancy condo in Malibu. The very next day after an old, failed, drunk painter who is another friend and neighbor of Howell's is found dead in his apartment in a tub full of blood, a vacuous-looking "actor" (Fahey) arrives to take the place.

From then on, Howell, who already doubts the old artist's "suicide," picks up tidbits that supposedly make him suspicious of the actor, enlists Chong in spying on him, and blows off Cox's efforts to get him to look at the condo and go to parties with her plastic friends. From time to time, a few lines from a TV news program can be heard playing in the background at Howell's apartment, reporting that the informant has been moved to a new safehouse and that the drug kingpin's trial is fast approaching. This obvious gimmick passes for subtlety in the film.

The movie takes a very long time to reach completely predictable, anticlimactic conclusions -- both the main crime plot and the romantic subplot. And it has nothing interesting to say along the way. Rather than suspenseful, the film can be best described as trying and annoying. By the time it gets to the sinister tag-lines, "Cat, that's a funny name. How many lives do you have?" and "Didn't anybody ever tell you, curiosity kills?", it has long been clear that the threadbare movie has nothing interesting or dramatic to offer.

The movie also depends on ludicrous plot gimmicks. For example, the "actor" leaves the audio feed from a bug he has somehow planted in the new "safe-house" apartment across the street blaring in his own apartment while he is away, which, of course, Howell and Chong overhear (and at first misunderstand, further dragging out the proceedings). We are supposed to believe that a 911 call will be directly routed to a corrupt cop. On top of that, somehow the non-stop hacking cough that the bad cop has in every conversation with the hit man and that is overheard by Howell is absent throughout his entire early conversations with Howell. We are also supposed to believe that even after a massacre of its own men who were protecting the informant and his survival by sheer luck, the police would move the informant to a new building without checking out the residents of a building with a direct line of fire into the informant's apartment. And the police would let the informant sit in plain view in front of an uncovered window. And they would be fooled into opening the door by a sloppy impersonation.

After unprevented carnage all around, we are supposed to find a conclusion satisfying in which Howell and Chong sit together in the sunshine on a couch on the edge of the roof. They exchange a few light lines about "That was quite an adventure we had," "Well, we did the best we could," "I can't leave this building," "Or your neighbor," and end up kissing. The only redeeming feature of the film is that Howell and Chong, playing their earnest young characters, are pleasant to watch, and, believe it or not, the ending is actually kind of sweet. But otherwise the movie is a flimsy, boring, amateurish waste of time.

Yes, it came from Hitchcock's "Rear Window&qu...

[lovepix · 30 August 1999]

Yes, it came from Hitchcock's "Rear Window". Problem is: they forgot, among other things, credibility, logic and inspiration. Howell is a janitor in a ruined LA building, finds his old friend Harry dead in the bathtub, thinks he killed himself. But when a new lodger takes the dead man's apartment, he smells, based on nothing, trouble and crime. And he and Rae Dawn Chong peeks and peeks the fellow's movements. He is a killer, and the target is in the building across the street. Forget it, don't peek at this one. Two stars.