Fatal Secrets (Review)

Fatal Secrets

Fatal Secrets aka Balancing the Books (2009)

Directed by Meir Sharony

I'll admit I've watched my share of Lifetime Movies of the week. I've even documented it on this here site. So what? Are you judging me?

OK go ahead and judge because I recently watched another clone of these movies called Fatal Secrets. I wasn't expecting it to be a hardcore I Spit on your Grave rape and revenge nasty but maybe we'd see some psychological torture involved. But in the end it's a straight to cable sort of rape and revenge film that has some name stars in it.

Fatal Secrets is clearly a carbon copy of Lifetime's steady dose of women scorn flicks. Dina Meyer stars as Julia, a divorced woman who meets Scott but things go all wrong. Scott rapes Julia and now she's haunted by this mental and physical ordeal.

She confides with her friends Rebecca (Lea Thomspon) and Sharlene (Lela Rochon) who both have had past and current trauma themselves. After some investigating Julia starts to uncover the true identity of "Scott" by breaking into his house and doing some Mission Impossible style digging. Soon she's Googling his name and finding out about his mysterious past.

This leads to a trip to Texas and a church in a small community. Seems Scott has done some messed up things here as well and stolen some money. But Julia takes her own form of justice and kidnaps the man who hurt her. The conclusion I think does a 180 in terms of Lifetime movie of the week endings and clearly lives up to it's title.

OK I've watched a few women scorn movies but I'm no expert. I tend to use logic like an alpha male and start asking pesky questions. Call the police? Why wasn't this an option? I've seen my share of Law and Order: SVU and clearly the police can arrest somebody and convict them in an hour.

The performances are all OK and besides the big three we have cameos from Ernie Hudson and Ed Begley Jr. Dina Meyer plays prey turned predator decently enough and Scott played by Vincent Spano plays evil guy well enough.

With all this logic, I decided I should have the target audience watch this film. And who do I know that's the right demographic? My mom of course. I think she'd say it was "shocking" and "suspenseful" and had "a had a crazy ending". She digs the scorn and scorn avenged is this flick in a nutshell. So if you wanna watch a flick with your mom, this be it.

The Vitals

• Official Site
  

Rating (for mom's):


Check out the trailer below.

Categories: dina meyer, independent cinema, indie film, mti video, rape and revenge films, Revenge movie