100 Feet

R4 DVD

Icon Films

100 feet is the distance a prisoner can move when in home confinement. If they go further they have three minutes to return to the designated zone or they will be returned to prison and ten years added to their sentence. Marnie Watson (Famke Janssen) was married to a violent police officer. She reported his domestic abuse many times but the reports were simply filed away and no action was taken. After years of abuse, she kills him in self defence and ends up in jail.

After having a hard time inside, her last year is to be spent in home confinement. She is fitted with an ankle security bracelet and a distance detector at the top of the first floor. Returning to the home where so much violence occurred is difficult for Marnie. It is not helped by the fact that her assigned case officer is Detective Shanks, her husband’s ex-partner and that her neighbours and family have abandoned her. Her mother died trying to get her out of prison and had left the small insurance policy she had to pay off the house so Marnie has somewhere to live when she comes out of prison. Her sister is not impressed.

As she settles in, strange things begin to occur. She cleans the bloodstain off the kitchen wall, only to find it has returned the next day. After a terrifying vision of her dead husband and a large bruise on her face, she realizes that her husband’s control and violence has continued beyond the grave. Michael Paré is impressive as Mike Watson, the vengeful ghost of a violent cop.

As a ghost story this really is quite novel. The sense of claustrophobia is palpable. Here is a woman terrorized by domestic abuse yet her pleas are ignored by police because he is one of their own. Finally she is driven to murder and ends in jail. To add insult to injury she is returned to the scene of the crime and left without support, food or electricity to fend for herself. The psychological aspects of the story are just as interesting as the “supernatural”, especially when Shanks, at last, checks her story and finds the “filed” reports about Mike’s violence against her.

There were a few things that I felt did not quite work as well as they should. The film placed a strong emphasis on special effects – you see the ghost early on and the attacks on Marnie got pretty “over the top”. In any “supernatural” film there is a trade off; show the creature too late and people lose interest, show it too early and you have to go a long way to keep their attention. In my mind the ghost was shown way too early and this really reduced the suspense level of the film and forced the director to use a lot of special effects which became excessive.

My other misgiving is the ending; it is not giving too much away to say that throwing a wedding ring at a ghost causing it to explode into flames and disintegrate is pretty much a letdown. This is a ghost which can materialize, throw furniture and even kill but he is defeated by a wedding ring, come on !

100 Feet is not your run of the mill ghost story. It does have an inventive plot, superior acting and some nice special effects. It will hold your interest and make you jump off your seat at regular intervals – however, it could have been better if the ending and directing had been refined a bit more.

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This review will appear in Volume 2 No.4 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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