The Secrets of Comfort House (2006 TV Movie) User Reviews (2)

Secrets of Comfort House-Uncomfortable **1/2

[edwagreen · 5/10 · 14 June 2007]

Someone has done 3 battered women a favor. The favor has been to kill each of their abusive husbands.

The film takes place in a rough neck area of Oregon. It seems to be fashionable there to hit your wife.

Our heroine has moved to this town. She is a social worker who killed her brother-in-law. The latter had been beating her sister and ultimately killed her.

New in Oregon, she begins to take in battered women but soon becomes the focus of the investigation when three of the women she takes in conveniently have their husbands killed.

The suspicions of our heroine as the killer seem to be obvious. There is a vicious police chief in town who takes a dislike to the woman and suspends his deputy, the latter having found love with this woman.

With less than a half-hour remaining, the plot resolves itself. It is a surprise ending but we have seen things like this before.

Brokeback Mountain: The Real Story

[lavatch · 7/10 · 24 November 2019]

The film opens with a group of women who have just finished viewing "Brokeback Mountain" on television. The women sardonically contrast the gay characters of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist with the studs Paul Newman and Robert Redford in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." The women may be forgiven for their homophobic impressions of Ennis and Jack because they have taken shelter in the Comfort House after being physically abused by their husbands.

The protagonist Wendy Brown has come to the small mountain town of Corinth after killing her brother-in-law, who had abused her sister. The murder was committed in self-defense. Now, Wendy wants to come to the assistance of the women in this community who have especially vile husbands and no protection from the local sheriff named "Bear" Trapp.

By the midpoint, the film is developing its theme of the battered women effectively when it takes a wrong turn with a convoluted subplot about the death of young Bradley, who was allegedly shot in a hunting accident, but was in fact an eyewitness to arson. The secret of Bradley's death is what is driving the murder of a number of the locals with the blame assigned to Wendy.

Working with an uncharacteristically decent young cop named Curtis, Wendy seeks to clear her name, so that she can continue doing her altruistic work at Comfort House. In the end, the "culture" of the community of Corinth sheds interesting light on the "Brokeback Mountain" film and why Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist were just as vulnerable as the women of Corinth, who had to deal with the animals who were thinly disguised as men.