Stuck

The ‘whatever happened to?’ career of Mena Suvari shows no sign of a revival as the erstwhile American Beauty turns American psycho for this grubby little wince-maker from shlock specialist Stuart Gordon.
 
After outrageous adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator and From Beyond, Gordon looks to a more contemporary horror hero - Stephen King - for inspiration.

Unfortunately, despite tinkering with the trapped-and-alone premises of King’s Misery and Gerald's Game, he doesn’t find it.

The squelchiness begins with Suvari’s care home nurse Brandi hosing down a bed-soiling old timer. Happily, the day improves when she is offered a promotion. Time for a night on the tiles.

In contrast, the day couldn’t get any worse for jobless, hapless and homeless Tom (Rea). Actually, it could and it does when the inebriated Brandi mows him down on a pedestrian crossing.

In her hit-and-run panic, Brandi races home, locks the car in the garage and waits for her lowlife boyfriend Rashid (Russell Hornsby) to show up.

“Did you get a look at him?” he asks. It would be difficult not to, given that the poor sod is still halfway through her windscreen with a snapped leg and a wiper blade lodged in his guts.

Assuming Tom is just another expendable bum, Brandi leaves him overnight while she and Rashid get jiggy. Then, next morning, she bashes him unconscious while she goes to work. Cute.

One way or the other, both parties have to figure out how they are going to extricate themselves from the painful predicament.

With a girl going ga-ga and enough splintering bones, gurgling wounds and punctured eyeballs to keep the gorehounds happy, all the ingredients are here for a palm-dampening psychological thriller.

But while it’ll certainly make you wince, Gordon’s slapsticky execution and misguided injections of humour serve only to bleed the situation of suspense. What emerges is not so much horror as a grisly farce.

Stuck. You’d have to be to watch it.

Elliott Noble