A Young Reese Witherspoon and Lots of '90s Hokiness in Fear
Film: Fear (1996). Young Actresses: Alyssa Milano, 23, and Reese Witherspoon, 19.
It's hard to pinpoint even one minute of this movie that isn't completely over-the-top and ridiculous. The plot is an absurd, badly-written love story turned horror story between 16-year-old Nicole (Reese) and David (a young Mark Wahlberg, The Lovely Bones, about five years Reese's senior). He's all charm and good manners at first, but quickly turns abusive and controlling. He tattoos Nicole's name on his chest, stalks her, builds an altar to her in his house, and kills her male friend, but the police are too incompetent to do anything, leaving Nicole's dad Steve (William Petersen) to protect her. Unfortunately, he's pretty incompetent too, while David is a criminal mastermind with a gang of bikers at his command, ready to do his dirty work.
See what I mean about over-the-top? But if you lower your expectations and just go with it, this movie can be pretty fun.
A promo still of Nicole (Reese) and her best friend Margo (Alyssa) at a party
Nobody gives a good performance here, but in their defense, nobody has good material to work with, and the movie is still watchable in an amusingly bad way. There's also a very '90s feeling to it, especially in throwbacks like Nicole's clothes, her huge carphone (remember those?), and the fact that David is able to follow her into her high school cafeteria, despite not even being a student there. Apparently back in the days before school shootings, campuses had no security. Another highlight for is Alyssa's role as Nicole's best friend Margo. The close-up shot of her screaming, "You're my only friend!" at Nicole has to be one of the biggest eyeroll moments of the whole eyeroll-worthy movie.
A lot of it is humorously bad, but the movie is uncomfortably bad in the cheap way that it sexualizes its young star. Nicole and David never actually have a sex scene, but David does brag to Steve about "busting her cherry," and he maintains eye contact with Steve while kissing her. Nicole spends most of the movie shifting between her father and her boyfriend's influences over her, never actually standing up for herself. And for some completely pointless reason, the poster is of Nicole shirtless against David's chest. (Wow, how classy.) In a better film, maybe this wouldn't have felt so cheap and insulting, but in a low-quality movie like Fear, it's the most shallow kind of shallow shock value.
It's hard to pinpoint even one minute of this movie that isn't completely over-the-top and ridiculous. The plot is an absurd, badly-written love story turned horror story between 16-year-old Nicole (Reese) and David (a young Mark Wahlberg, The Lovely Bones, about five years Reese's senior). He's all charm and good manners at first, but quickly turns abusive and controlling. He tattoos Nicole's name on his chest, stalks her, builds an altar to her in his house, and kills her male friend, but the police are too incompetent to do anything, leaving Nicole's dad Steve (William Petersen) to protect her. Unfortunately, he's pretty incompetent too, while David is a criminal mastermind with a gang of bikers at his command, ready to do his dirty work.
See what I mean about over-the-top? But if you lower your expectations and just go with it, this movie can be pretty fun.
A promo still of Nicole (Reese) and her best friend Margo (Alyssa) at a party
Nobody gives a good performance here, but in their defense, nobody has good material to work with, and the movie is still watchable in an amusingly bad way. There's also a very '90s feeling to it, especially in throwbacks like Nicole's clothes, her huge carphone (remember those?), and the fact that David is able to follow her into her high school cafeteria, despite not even being a student there. Apparently back in the days before school shootings, campuses had no security. Another highlight for is Alyssa's role as Nicole's best friend Margo. The close-up shot of her screaming, "You're my only friend!" at Nicole has to be one of the biggest eyeroll moments of the whole eyeroll-worthy movie.
A lot of it is humorously bad, but the movie is uncomfortably bad in the cheap way that it sexualizes its young star. Nicole and David never actually have a sex scene, but David does brag to Steve about "busting her cherry," and he maintains eye contact with Steve while kissing her. Nicole spends most of the movie shifting between her father and her boyfriend's influences over her, never actually standing up for herself. And for some completely pointless reason, the poster is of Nicole shirtless against David's chest. (Wow, how classy.) In a better film, maybe this wouldn't have felt so cheap and insulting, but in a low-quality movie like Fear, it's the most shallow kind of shallow shock value.