Elsewhere
Elsewhere
R | 15 January 2009 (USA)
Elsewhere Trailers

A teen girl disappears after trying to meet men online in order to escape her small town. Apparently, only her best friend worries enough to investigate the mystery.

Reviews
LeonLouisRicci

Although the Movie Looks Pretty Good and is Slickly Presented for a Very Low Budget Entry in the Teen Hottie in Peril Category, this is Far from an Engaging Story and is So Bland, Considering its Subject Matter, One Wonders, What's the Point?If it's an Attempt at Making a Non-Gory, Serial-Killer, Social Media Warning, it Mostly Fails to Make an Impression, of Any Kind. It is Even Less than Mediocre Because it is Even Less than Anything Approaching Entertaining for its Target Audience.The Acting is Universally Bad, Especially the Non-Hotties. The Trailer Park Mother is a Clichéd, Chain Smoking, TV Watcher who is So Familiar it Bores to Tears. The Shaking Alcoholic Mother of the First Missing Girl Overacts So Much it is Amazing the Director Allowed the Performance to Stand. The Male Actors, the Cop, the Nerd, and the Father are All just Awful.Overall, it is Not Even Worth a Watch because it is Anemic, Embarrassingly Acted, and Fails to Deliver the Minimum of Suspense and Thrills that is Central to this Kind of Thing.Note...For Fairness and Balance...there is one good Acting turn and that is Olivia Dawn York. She delivers the only believable Character in a Cast of Thespians who would have benefited from a Director that seemed to be Elsewhere.

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MBunge

Elsewhere is a middling little concoction that's one or two ingredients away from being really good. It's like a Nancy Drew Mystery without a mystery but with a serial killer. Writer/director Nathan Hope came up with a lot of nice ancillary pieces and then assembled them around an empty core. The result is a promising beginning, an anticipatory middle and a disappointing ending.Jillian and Sarah (Tania Raymonde and Anna Kendrick) are teenaged best friends. Jillian is a rocker chick whose edginess hides a desperate desire to get far away from a life she hates. Sarah is a good girl and that's pretty much it. The character has the disposition of a coat rack and while Anna Kendrick makes a very cute coat rack, Sarah being such a non-entity becomes the biggest problem in the entire movie.After a stretch of time where Jillian and Sarah lounge around doing terribly typical teenage stuff, Jillian disappears. Sarah investigates and with no help from her absentee mother, she turns to computer geek Jasper (Chuck Carter) for assistance. The only clue is a video sent from Jillian's cell phone that shows the inside of a school bus and then Jillian screams.Sarah eventually discovers that Jillian is only one of several missing girls, but who is responsible? Is it Officer Berg (Jeff Daniel Phillips), the creepy local cop? Billy (Paul Wesley), the high school dickhead? Is it the unstable Patty (Shannon Holt), mother of a girl who vanished 5 years ago? Well, there's honestly not much of a puzzle to figure out here. There really is no series of clues in this story that eventually lead to the identity of the killer. There are only a couple of pathetic, obviously constructed red herrings inserted into the script long after a reasonably astute viewer has deduced everything for him or herself. I mean, the average episode of Speed Buggy or Jabberjaw had a more elaborate mystery to solve than this film.That narrative weakness isn't that aggravating because writer/director Hope emphasizes the characters and their interrelationships over plot developments. The roles are all fairly clichéd - "girl acting out", "jock jackass", "super strict father" - but they're well constructed clichés and the cast perfectly provides the formulaic performances for which they were asked. Except for Jeff Daniel Phillips, who appears to be doing a bad Jack Nicholson impersonation all the time he's on screen. And the connections/confrontations between the characters achieve a certain believability. For example, you can feel the layered friendship between Jillian and Sarah and the long standing animosity between Billy and Jasper.Unfortunately, the blankest and least developed character in Elsewhere is also the main character in the story. Sarah has the most lines and is in almost every scene, but has the least amount of personality in the whole cast. That's not Kendrick's fault. She doesn't do a bad acting job. There's simply nothing distinctive, individualistic or interesting about Sarah. Having such a void as the leading role undermines every dramatic aspect of the movie. It's not a fatal flaw but, geez, this thing would have been soooooo much better if Sarah has disappeared and Jillian had been the one to look for her.Elsewhere does look good, moves at a satisfactory clip and has several effective though quite illogical scares. Combined with more than adequate acting in all but one case, that's usually enough for a film like this. But the emptiness of its plot and main character prevents Elsewhere from being fully entertaining. It's certainly better than most of the crap out there, yet there's no need to go out of your way to see it.

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Paul Andrews

Elsewhere is set in a small US town where best friends Sarah (Anna Kendrick) & Jillian (Tania Raymonde) work in a small town café together, however Jillian has far greater ambitions & has set herself up an on-line internet account where she poses for naughty photo's & gets to turn anonymous men on all over the world. Jillain's ex boyfriend Chris (Joshua Swanson is having a part & while Sarah wants to go Jillain says she has other plans & hints at meeting one of her on-line admirers cryptically called MrX, that night at the party Sarah sees Jillain arguing with Chris but thinks little of it until she gets a call from Jillain the next day asking for help. No-one seems to have seen Jillian since the night of the party & Sarah becomes convinced something bad has happened to her best friend & sets out to play detective & find out what has happened but at the risk of her own life...Written & directed by Nathan Hope I must admit right away that I though Elsewhere was as boring & rubbish a mystery thriller as I could have been unfortunate enough to have to sit through, seriously this is really bland & dull going for all of it's overlong 105 odd minute duration. For a start it's painfully slow, even having watched it all it felt like nothing barely happened, the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Jillian didn't do anything for me as she was fairly unlikable to start with & the the two-bit nothing excuse of a lame ending just makes you feel made at having wasted so much time on this. Basically it is never revealed what happened to Jillain, sure it makes clear that she is dead but the where & how are strangely absent with some rubbish about a guy killing her because she wanted to make him do bad things, yeah that's the entire plot & the script never goes into it any deeper than that. Is that dumb revelation really worth investing so much time in? No, it isn't & as someone who did invest the time I am fully qualified to say. There are various subplots that go absolutely nowhere like the sinister cop, Jillain's mum & Chris the boyfriend who are all totally forgotten about & barely make any sort of impact because their screen time & character's are so limited. The dialogue is bland, the character's are poor & the plot is just a boring whodunit with an extremely weak twist ending which doesn't really even qualify as much of a twist since it's what most people will be expecting.There's a fairly strong anti-Internet char room type message going on here as that is more or less blamed for Jillian's death (but what about the previous victims?) & again religious fanaticism is also hung up as a great evil. Apart from a few drops of blood at the end there is zero gore here, I mean there isn't even a dead body seen & no-one is killed on screen either & it's just as dry as the Sahara desert. The whole film looks like an average made for telly flick with competent if bland production values & a totally forgettable small town setting. There is no tension, atmosphere, nothing builds-up & the cautionary moralising means you'll wish you were elsewhere to...With a supposed budget of about $500,000 this has reasonable if bland production values. Apparently filmed in Indiana. The acting is alright but the cast can't help make this plodding nonsense any more enjoyable.Elsewhere is a tedious mystery thriller that is neither mysterious or thrilling, it's predictable & boring & not worth wasting your time with. Get your entertainment elsewhere, but not this Elsewhere if you know what I mean...

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octavo-cuervo

This may see as a kind of expensive for a B series movie. It seems that there is a rule in all movies with a small town as the main scenario, and it is that at least one of the characters usually feels limited in the little town. This is the case of Jillian, a waitress in a local coffee shop who also is father-orphan and has a hard relationship with his mother. Jill and Sarah, the main character, are best friends and opposite sites of a coin. When Jillian begins to see men attracted to her by her sexy profile in an Internet site, Sarah realizes the great danger for her friend. Finally the expected happens and Jill disappears after one date with a guy met through his internet page. Since this moment the movie is centered in the Sarah's search for her girlfriend. The movie, as you have read is not original at all, and the only nice thing seen on it is the good (but very short) acting of Tania Raymonde as Jillian. Maybe the only interesting things came from the few mix of suspects that are presented in the film, including an ex-boyfriend of Jillian, a library rat friend and the father of a colleague at the coffee shop, plus all the strange men included in his internet profile.

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