Jennifer Eight (1992)

That was an excellent one.

Instant Favorite.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

I knew once I had started watching this that I had seen it before - a long time ago as a teenager watching a late night movie. I enjoyed it then and I enjoyed watching it now again. Some of the performances are brilliant. John Malkovich gives a mesmerising turn as the prosecuting detective. Andy Garcia is convincing overall and Uma Thurman was very believable in a part that's hard to play. Lance Henriksen and Graham Beckel are great and tend to be those guys you've seen in lots of movies but can't quite place. Overall it is engaging and builds up to a thrilling pace. Unfortunately it does go over the top as too many twists and turns take us to a very abrupt ending. I couldn't help but expect more from it. The plot is terrifying - a serial killer of blind women. It started right. It just took off at some stage into the realms of the wildly unbelievable. I think that the plot and the cast probably deserved more. If it was more measured, brooding and clean in it's execution it could have been a great. This isn't to say that it's not a good movie. It is and it's worth a watch if you like your thrillers.

"John Berlin" (Andy Garcia) is a police detective who has recently moved from Los Angeles to the small Californian town of Euricka further up north. As soon as he gets there he encounters a certain degree of hostility from one of the cops named "John Taylor" (Graham Beckel) who feels the position should have gone to him. He also discovers that a possible serial killer is murdering women but nobody in the police department seems willing to support him except for his old friend and mentor "Detective Freddy Ross" (Lance Henriksen). Now rather than reveal any more of this movie I will just say that it had a pretty good plot. Unfortunately, the pace was much too slow and there appeared to be too much detail given to various mundane issues to the detriment of suspense and action. Even so I liked the performances of both Andy Garcia and Lance Henriksen and for that reason I have rated it accordingly. Slightly above average.

Police detective John Berlin (Andy Garcia) moves from L.A. to the small town of Eureka. There's a dead body before even he starts his job. A suicide is found in the garbage dump. Freddy Ross (Lance Henriksen) is his partner. Then they find a hand. There was a girl nicknamed Jennifer found a couple of years ago without a head or hands. Mike Blattis is the local reporter. John Taylor is a cop who thinks that Berlin stole his promotion. His boss Citrine is gun-shy after the last debacle. Berlin is staying with Ross and his wife Margie. The excessive scars on the hand leads them to the victim being blind named Amber studying at a local institute. They interview her blind friend Helena (Uma Thurman). Only Berlin believes that there is a serial killer.This is a rather slow murder mystery thriller. I like the mood. Uma Thurman is gorgeous as the blind girl. However 2 hours is simply too long for a simple murder mystery. There aren't enough twists and turns to justify spending so much time. Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, I think another filmmaker would have cut the movie shorter. He's probably more used to movies with much more stuff to squeeze in. There are too many sections where not much happens in the investigation.

The prime character in 'Jennifer Eight' is blind but everyone in the film might as well be blind, deaf and mute to be able to miss the obvious indications that lead right to the killer from the moment that individual is on screen. Everyone seems to look the other way to avoid the person who turns out to be the killer maybe because the movie still has an hour or so to pad out, the time that it becomes crystal clear to the audience who that person is.The movie stars Andy Garcia as a cop with a movie cop name – John Berlin. He goes to investigate a murder, which leads to him digging through the trash to find body parts. He finds a woman's severed hand and after an analysis turns up that the woman was blind because the fingertips have worn down from reading Braille and that the hand spent some time in a freezer.He is soon on the trail of a killer who stalks blind women because several blind women have been killed in the area with that same M.O. Garcia interviews Helena (Uma Thurman), the woman's roomy who is herself blind. She and the cop fall in love not because of a mutual attraction rather because they are a man and a woman thrown together in a movie in which her life will eventually be in danger and he will have to save the woman he loves.Thurman is usually the luminous element to any movie but here her character is so pitiful that she doesn't need protection so much as she just needs a big old hug. The movie might want you to have sympathy for her but it doesn't back out when opportunity arises to have her slip nude into a bathtub while the killer skulks around her apartment.'Jennifer Eight' almost counts down the minutes to the next inevitable move. The movie is set up in a series of unbelievably predictable vignette so familiar to this genre. The movie is one part thriller, one part love story, one part police procedural written by people who obviously believe that you can't have one without the other.