Sweet Murder (1993)

Very disappointing...

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This movie could easily be pegged as a South African/Canadian rip-off of "Single White Female" except it was made two years BEFORE the Hollywood thriller and the villain is not so much an obsessive stalker as a criminal psychopath along the lines of a female version of the Patricia Highsmith character "Tom Ripley". The rather implausible story involves a naive young woman (Embeth Davitz) moving into an apartment with a mousy roommate (Helene Udy), even though the latter is unemployed and she basically has to support this stranger. Luckily though, she has a good job at a bookstore, a handsome new boyfriend, and she's about to come into a lot of money. . .Canadian beauty Helene Udy looks about as convincing as a shy, mousy wallflower as Jennifer Jason Leigh does in "Single White Female", and she's certainly not as good of actress as Leigh (but then few actresses are). She has glasses, stringy hair, and overalls, but all she really has to do is wash her hair, ditch her glasses, and take off her overalls (along with everything else) and she has no problem getting her roommate's boyfriend into bed. Still, this is one of Udy's meatier roles. Usually, she was relegated to playing a sexy young thing in dumbass Canuck-sploitation fare like "Pinball Summer", or the occasional bit part in superior Canadian horror flicks like "Pin". Davidtz is easily confused with another more famous statuesque actress of Afrikaner origins, Charlize Theron. She basically plays a rather dimwitted, sexy young thing in THIS movie, but would go on to meatier parts in Robert Altman's "The Gingerbread Man" and the recent indie favorite "Junebug".The director Percival Ruben was responsible for the early 80's South African slasher/Cameron Mitchell film "The Demon", which is not good, but I think is rather unfairly maligned. This movie is about the same quality--it's not an undiscovered classic, but I'm not asking for my money back either.

Percy Rubens, the director of this gem, is an ultra-obscure film maker who, apparently, specialized in South African rip-offs of successful American films. His movie THE DEMON was a re-working of HALLOWEEN set in Johannesburg, and SWEET MURDER must have been his attempt to do a SINGLE WHITE FEMALE-style thriller. Well, his attempt was pathetic! First of all, the film is staged almost entirely indoors and looks like it was shot in a set of low-rent office suites. The main character, an unemployed weirdo with daddy issues, is supposed to be an American woman from Kentucky who just happened to accidentally end up in South Africa when she was backpacking through Europe. She spends the whole movie moping around in a pair of overalls, stopping occasionally to stab someone or don a really bad blond wig. They talk about her looking for a job, but they don't explain how a vagabond American would ever obtain a work permit. In fact, they don't even come out and say they live in South Africa, opting instead to make vague references about "the city," "the country," and other euphemisms (maybe they were scared of the trade embargo).At least THE DEMON could be appreciated by fans of those grainy, crusty, low-budget crime movies of the late 1970's and early 1980's (it did, in fact, have the same look and feel of the old "Police Story" TV series). SWEET MURDER, with its cheap sets and hokey acting, resembles a Spanish-language sitcom written and directed by someone who thinks "Don't have a cow, man!" is a common utterance by angered Americans. Even the video box is a bad carbon copy of the ad print for SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, except the women featured on the tape sleeve aren't even the ones in the movie. Bad movie... Bad, bad movie.

I work in a video store, and I must have walked by this video hundreds of times before I noticed it. I almost wish I wouldn't have. The box said it was 'as suspenseful as Single White Female.' In reality it was about as suspenseful as a Bugs Bunny Cartoon. A rating of 4 at the most. The cinematography is poor, the storyline is boring and the acting is certainly no Oscar material. The most horrible part of the entire movie comes each time the main character (I have forgotten her name already) takes a victim. The sound effects are atrocious. The sound of a stabbing knife sounds more like someone slapping a plastic motel pillow. I wouldn't recommend this movie to anyone in desire of a decent film.

I just watched this one at broadcast.com.It is an interesting movie, but not a very complete one. Like many low budget movies, the cinematography is poor. Scenes do not flow well, but seem to jump around. At times, things are overdone and at times they are way under done.The acting is acceptable.The movie also lacks is a logical plot. Things are not tied together well. Events just happen, without any logical sense.The opening & ending scenes are quite intriguing, but unfortunately the rest of the movie falls short. It was a good idea, in theory, but it just doesn't deliver. Overall, slightly above average 6/10.