GONE
DIRECTOR: Heitor Dhalia
CAST: Amanda Seyfried, Wes Bentley, Emily Wickersham and Daniel Sunjata
CLASSIFICATION: 16 V
RUNNING TIME: 94 minutes
RATING: **
They’re in all of the Scream movies, even Scary Movie. Bad guys clearly have a taste for blonde women who can be abducted in the darkest moments of the day wearing nothing but underwear or pyjamas.
The latter were Jill Conway’s chosen undergarments when she was abducted one night. The serial killer tossed her into a large hole in the ground in a forest but didn’t leave her for dead.
It was when he decided to climb down into the hole to do whatever it was he’d abducted Jill (Seyfried, pictured) for that he got a nasty surprise: a stab with the dried bone of one of many girls he’d abducted and whose bodies he’d left to decompose in the hole. Jill was the only one to make it out alive. But as is the norm in cheap thrillers, no one believed her story.
Now, Jill relies on her phone’s alarm tone to remind her to smile and a copious amount of medicine capsules to cope with everyday reality. But she’s convinced that the killer is still on the loose and sooner or later he’s coming back for the one who got away.
When recovering alcoholic and Jill’s sister, Molly (Wickersham), goes missing on the night before a major exam, the whole county chalks it up to Molly having fallen off the wagon. But Jill knows her sister was taken from her bed – in her pyjamas – by the same man who took her from her bed and plunged her face-down into a dark hole in the forest a year ago. Now she just has to prove it.
Fittingly, Seyfried is the leading lady. Seriously, those bug eyes have earned her some typecasting points. Think Red Riding Hood and Jennifer’s Body. In Gone, Seyfried is once again the blonde that films like Scary Movie attempt to make fun of. Sunjata brings a welcome bad-ass quality to the film as the detective who refuses to believe Jill hasn’t gone off her rocker.
Gone is a typical thriller where every man is meant to look menacing and every shadow intimidating but at the end of the movie, that’s all it is: typical. There have been enough films that parody the thriller where a blonde is abducted from her house in her pyjamas.
If you liked … Scream and P2 … then you may like this