Three dirty bombs go off in L.A. which mean the whole city is on lockdown. This movie follows the story of a man living near the city with his wife. All we see is him doing what the radio tells him to do for 90 minutes.This would make a good educational video if it wasn't sold as a disaster movie. It just teaches you how authorities say "We're here to help you" while pointing a gun in your face.Unless you're going to make a disaster movie which shows us what's happening then don't bother. Having a radio playing reports over and over is very dull and extremely lazy.

Unemployed musician Brad is at home when terrorists set off a dirty bomb in LA, where wife Lexi works. Brad manages to seal up the house against the clouds of toxic dust: Lexi manages to struggle home through the chaos and Brad, following instructions, won't let her in.This small scale movie is quietly horrifying on both personal and impersonal levels as Brad and Lexi start to come to terms with what has happened and its likely consequences. There is a twist which is, frankly, both unbelievable and unnecessary but, putting that to one side, there is an air of credibility surrounding this claustrophobic drama.It is quite well written, well performed and directed, and moderately gripping. But it is not likely to leave you with warm fuzzy feelings afterwards.

Sorry, but I have to agree with a lot of reviews I read about this film. It starts well and drops dramatically into pointless tedium. I would never recommend this film to anyone. I do not consider it a good example of independent film-making.The way that Lexi comes and goes freely while the rest of the neighborhood is rounded up defies any logic. I really did not understand the point of the character of the neighbor's handyman. He served no purpose in the film at all, the character and his conversations with Brad contributed absolutely nothing. The character added nothing to the plot whatsoever. The character comes and then leaves, offering an explanation contrary to points he makes earlier in the film for seeking refuge in the first place, making no sense at all.The only positive is that Mary McCormack and Rory Cochrane really make a lot out of a truly awful script. The series of pointless conversations between the main protagonists loses all of the tension built in the opening 20 minutes but at no point did I think that their performances were poor. Good actors making the most of poor material.The ending was very clever, even if it was revealed in one mumbled line proffered by a faceless character in a HazMat suit, but by then I had given up caring about any of the characters at all and couldn't wait for the film to end. The ending would have made more sense if we had followed either Lexi or Brad through the whole experience (probably Lexi to be honest) just to have it all juxtaposed at the end. If the scriptwriters had mad Brad a total S.O.B. and Lexi a victim of his selfishness, then the ending may have had more shock value and currency.

I sure hope writer/director Chris Gorak is a better lover than he is a filmmaker, because this movie is one of the worst cases of premature climax you'll ever see.Brad and Lexi (Rory Cochrane and Mary McCormack) are a routine Los Angeles married couple. He's an unemployed musician. She works at some indeterminate office. They've just moved into an average bungalow home relatively near downtown LA. Brad and Lexi seem to be utterly normal in every possible way. Then one day after Lexi goes to work, they and the rest of Los Angeles experience the extremely abnormal. A series of terrorist explosions tear through the city, scattering what the authorities describe as toxic ash through the air. With only reports from the radio to go on (Brad and Lexi didn't get their cable hooked up yet), Brad becomes more and more frantic. He tries to race downtown to get to his wife, but is chased back home by the police shutting down the streets.Alvaro (Tony Perez), a Latino handyman from next door, stumbles into Brad and Lexi's home looking for safety. He convinces Brad to follow the instructions from the radio and seal up the house with plastic and duct tape to keep out the contaminated ash. The radio says anyone who's been exposed to it is dangerous and should be quarantined. But as soon as the house is sealed, a coughing, ash-covered Lexi shows up outside and wants to come in. That would be the moment where what had been a pretty nice little film completely shoots its wad and is left spent and lifeless for the rest of its run time.A husband being forced to choose between his wife and his own life is about as high as you can crank up the stakes in any drama. The only thing more naturally dramatic would be the same situation with a parent and child. The problem is that Brad is confronted with this choice before the movie is even halfway over and absolutely nothing in the rest of the film has even half as much emotional tension. Everything after that point is anticlimactic and the movie is left to just tread water until writer/director Gorak tacks on a swerve ending where he tries to be darkly ironic and only succeeds in proving, yet again, that not everyone really understands irony.I also had a personal difficulty with Right at Your Door's premature climax. Basically…I felt like I got some in my eye. Without trying to spoil too much, I could not identify at all with the decision Brad makes. I suppose it's easy to think this, but I wouldn't do what Brad does and I believe most people wouldn't do it. If nothing else, most folks would lie to themselves about how bad their situation is to avoid such an awful dilemma. What Brad does isn't normal and the abnormality of it ejected me from this movie like I had been shot out of a cannon. Any investment I had made in it was gone and no more could be generated, which made noticing how much the story flounders from that point on unavoidable.If Gorak was intent on having this moment in his film, he either needed to figure out how to put it much later on or how to do it without neutering whatever comes after it. Maybe you take Brad out of the equation and have Lexi and Alvaro confront the predicament, come to a solution themselves and then they have to persuade Brad to go along with it.I surely wish Gorak had done something. Up to that point, Right at Your Door had been a gripping and energetic ride. The radio is used a bit too much as a source of easy exposition, but this movie is very effective at invoking the panic and paranoid fears that seized the American consciousness in the wake of 9/11. Brad finds himself in a world where civilization has vanished and he doesn't know what to do. Then that premature climax comes along and ruins it all.This joins The Green Mile as one of the best bad movies I've ever watched. Right at Your Door does a lot of things right, but it does one big thing so horribly wrong that none of it matters. The closest comparison I can come up with is asking you to imagine what Star Wars would be like if they blew up the Death Star in the first act.Damn. I hope I didn't just give George Lucas the idea for another Special Edition.