Tell Me No Lies

(2000)

Tell Me No Lies, aka In the Midnight Hour, is a Canadian thriller staring Amber Smith. Amber's estranged sister has been killed, and Amber moves to Santa Barbara and wins a midnight spot on the local college radio station. She hopes to somehow make things right with her dead sister. During her first night on the air, she gets a call from someone claiming to be the killer, and may well be, because he knows intimate details about her sister's body. The caller also knows what Amber looks like and where she lives, and promises to kill her. The rest of the film plays out as a whodunit, with the added topspin that Amber might or might not be killed before the killer is unmasked.

IMDb readers score this at 2.6, although the acting is not half bad, especially from a bunch of actresses willing to show their breasts in good light, and the cinematography and sound track are acceptable. Once you realize it is the first film from director Emmanuel Itier, you know the problem. He did not close some plot holes in the script, and even created some new ones with his blocking choices. Main problems include showing the face of the man the dead girl has sex with just before her death, the lack of motivation to show the female detective topless in a hot tub, and the complete lack of character development for the two detectives working on the case. They were also short on motivation for two of the murders.

The IMDb score seems too low. Based on comments and linked reviews, people were trying to make it into a softcore sex film or an erotic thriller, but it is really a straight thriller. The nudity consists entirely of breasts only, and the sex scenes cut from foreplay to afterglow. Add back in about three points for the film not being what the voters expected, and we are in the right territory.  The same script and cast in the hands of a competent director would have resulted in a decent thriller, and had they upped the sex and fixed the plot, it could have been an excellent erotic thriller.

Scoop's notes:

Actually, it was supposed to be an erotic thriller. At least that's what the director said in his notes on the DVD:

(The caps are his. He loves caps.)

"As I wrote it once in a song 'You cannot kill what cannot die.' I meant that the Soul, the Spirit within us, cannot be destroyed, only the body can be, somewhat, bent. Little that I know that I was going to be able to express this philosophy in an Erotic Thriller! I want to thank the Grand Mystery of Life, and Death, to always keep me on the Rocking side of Eternal Inspiration"

If you think that is gibberish, you should see the movie, which he calls his "True Erotic Punk-Rock Suspense Drama." One of the many hilariously bad things about this film is that it was filmed entirely in the director's house. The den with a wet bar is a "bar" (with a hastily pasted "exit" sign added for ultra-realism!). His rec room is a "disco." The upstairs bedrooms are a "college dorm." His editing room is a "radio station." 

The direction is unbelievably bad. In the movie's second scene, for example, two cops have a little spat while standing over the body. They are standing about 12 feet apart, so they can't both fit into a tight two shot. How did the director resolve this? He shot it in real time with one camera. The camera focuses on the one detective while he delivers his line, then pans at vertiginous speed to the other detective for her line, then back and forth so many times that I was getting nauseated. Several times the actors flubbed lines or delivered them wrong (e.g., one character says "she would have ... went"), but the director never stopped the camera from rolling. One camera, one take.

In the process of that discussion, Mr. Male Detective determines that this is the work of a serial killer, even though there are no other prior victims! I guess they never told him at the police academy that "serial" killing would have to require a minimum of two people, killed at separate times. Perhaps he meant "cereal," or perhaps he went to that same police academy as Steve Guttenberg.

 

Amber Smith

Erika Michaels

Yvette McLendon

Michelle Perry