100 Feet

Introduction

Marnie Watson (Famke Janssen) has been granted early release from prison after serving part of her sentence for the murder in self-defence of her abusive policeman husband Mike (Michael Paré). She's not free though, that would be too easy. Instead she is sentenced to house arrest and must wear an electronic ankle bracelet (this year's must have item…) and can't stray more than 100 feet from the base unit or an alarm will go off and call the cops. This would normally be fine if a little lonely for but for two reasons:

1. the base unit is situated in a place whereby Marnie can't actually walk to her front door without activating the alarm, thereby having to contort and stretch from her inner door in order to open it or get her mail. Good planning there…

2. the hugely disgruntled and violent ghost of ex-husband Mike is still in the house and he's a tad miffed at being dead



Marnie has the attentions of two other males to contend with. The first is the rather hostile policeman Shanks (Bobby Cannavale), Mike's ex-partner. Shanks doesn't quite seem to believe that Marnie killed her husband or that there was domestic violence involved by his partner. Shanks is openly hostile to Marnie and stakes out her house almost continuously in an attempt to find out something, but god knows what… The other male is local boy Joey (Ed Westwick) who initially delivers Marnie's groceries but soon becomes enamoured with the older woman.

Marnie then finds her existence revolving around occasional appearances by the two living males and poltergeist activity with a domestic violence theme to it. Marnie covers up her injuries from this spate of ghostly domestic violence with the usual excuses (fell down the stairs, bumped into a door) from her two male cohorts as she is afraid that they'll think she's crazy. And so Marnie takes her daily beatings whilst trying to find a way to rid herself of her ex-husband's ghost…

Overall

This isn't a bad film, despite the fact that everything here has been done before and better. There are some flaws to the film though, skipping completely over the violent ghost angle as that's a staple for genre films, such as the role of the ex-partner played by Bobby Cannavale. As a serving police officer, I'd like to know just how he could swing being on semi-permanent stakeout at Marnie's house and then when he is there (and you can tell with the growing number of bits of paper on his dashboard), he fails to hear a number of the screams from the object of his observations, although he manages to hear others.

As effectively the only main character, the film largely succeeds or fails based on Janssen's performance and that is pretty solid for a genre film. Unfortunately the script lets her down, particularly at the end with a very predictable and weak ending. The CGI isn't great either, which is a sign of the low budget, with the effects reminding me largely of the Kevin Bacon vehicle Hollow Man, although there is a point involving a waste disposal unit and a ghostly hand that bizarrely reminded me of A-Ha's Take On Me video. Which reminds me, if your house is haunted by the vengeful ghost of your ex-husband and you need to get rid of your wedding ring, the one place not to throw it is down the waste disposal unit. And if you must do that, then never ever attempt to retrieve by sticking your hand down there. I mean, really. That's just asking for trouble.



Where I really feel the film is let down though is in using domestic violence as the theme of the film and then chickening out by making the dead husband to be a corrupt cop as well. That is such a copout, forgive the pun. From research that I've seen, most men who abuse their spouses in such a way can seem very respectable and law abiding outside the privacy of their four walls. Admittedly this would have confused simple audiences who prefer their evil to be black and white but it would have been much more powerful not to have him as the archetypal bad guy.

Not bad, could've been better and the ending is weak.