Cover Art

Credits

Director: Uwe Boll Starring: Casper Van Dien, Michael Pare, Eric Roberts, Jennifer Rubin, Catherine Oxenberg, Michael Rasmussen, Tanja Reichert, David Milbern Screenplay: Uwe Boll Music: Uwe Spies Tagline: A serial killer is in your neighborhood Country: USA

On the surface Sanctimony appears to be a blatant American Psycho rip-off, although thankfully the final product manages to add enough subtle touches to separate itself from the novel by Easton Ellis and its subsequent film adaption. Director Uwe Boll has a great visual style, giving the dark Seattle streets a menacing look, while the cinematography of Mathias Neumann is quite impressive for what is obviously a low budget feature. The musical score from Uwe Spies was also quite impressive, adding some haunting touches to the slick visuals.

Fans of straight-to-video fodder will be more than familiar with some of the films cast, which boasts the likes of B-grade tough guys Michael Pare and Eric Roberts, as well as Jennifer Rubin and Catherine Oxenberg. Performances all round are as wooden as you can get, with Pare looking as though he has learned very little in his twenty odd years of performing in front of the cameras, while Rubin actually appeared to be reading her lines directly from a cue card on more than one occasion . Casper Van Dien is well cast as Tom Gerrick, with his own wooden acting style seemingly suited to the emotionless character he portrays. Are wooden acting performances a bad thing? Of course not. In fact, the acting helped add a much needed touch of cheese to the otherwise serious proceedings. Extra cheese always helps.

The plot itself is hardly what you would call engrossing, and the film seems to plod along at a fairly predictable rate for most of its running time with some of the more interesting sub-plots in the script (particularly the underground snuff film ring) being overlooked completely. Director/screenwriter Boll manages to cram in just about every cop movie cliché imaginable, from the Detective whose marriage is on the rocks as a result of his work commitments to the coroner who cracks morbid jokes about the mutilated murder victims he has to deal with, however things definitely pick up in the final fifteen minutes with Van Dien's character showing us his true colours by committing murder live on national television and then going on a gun crazy killing spree which featured enough "two fisted" gunplay and slow motion deaths to make me think I was watching a John Woo film.