SPOILERS DEAD AHEAD!!! BEWARE!!!

Sometimes I wish they would just stop trying, but then I bite my tongue because what would I do with all that excess spare time if I didn’t have bad movies to watch. Today’s bad movie is ‘Deceit’ from First Look Films which I believe made its debut on the Lifetime Network, but I was like totally unaware of this as somehow this film made it into my Netflix cue, wormed it’s way up to number one, landed on a mail truck and ended up on my living room floor under my mail chute. I think what the filmmakers where going for with this one was that always popular erotic, girl gone way bad type thriller, but alas the thrills were few, the eroticism was vacant and the girl wasn’t nearly bad enough.

Our film opens with Emily (Emmanuelle Chiriqui) get the living beejeebus beat out of her while Dave (Matt Long) sits in a bar, with the movie is doing the stylized quick flashback thing while Emily is getting waylaid and stabbed to death, or so we thought. Dave is taken to prison and questioned by female officers Hayes (Cynthia Petrello) and Pruitt (Ashley Scott). Dave claims he didn’t do what they claim he did despite the fact that his fingerprints are all over the weapon, the victims face, and he has motive out the ass. However, Dave is about to let them know that even though he didn’t do the crime that he been accused of, this is what he really did do and he has a story to tell.

As Dave will tell us he has a best buddy in Brian (Luke Mabry), a friend so close that Dave trusts him with his life. To repay this grand friendship, Dave sleeps with Brian’s girlfriend Emily and then begs her to leave Brian for him. Emily didn’t the mind the nasty sex but she ain’t even trying to leave her rich boyfriend so she declines. An old family friend who’s ‘been around the block’ named Anthony (Joe Pantoliano) tries to warn the boy about this Emily, but my man just doesn’t listen. Regardless, since he can’t have her, Dave moves away to New York as he had originally planned to go to law school.

Five years later Tragedy brings Dave back home with new girlfriend Claudia (Pell James) and now Emily and Brian are husband and wife, but those old feeling do die hard. This time however Emily seems down with the original plan as she has tired of Brian, but perhaps not of his money. Old Anthony again is around telling the boy to watch his ass, but does he listen? The new girlfriend knows something’s up to and decides head on back to New York to let these crazy kids handle their problems which in hindsight was probably a good idea because now bodies are starting to pile up because of our bad girl and it’s all pointing to Dave… probably because he did it.

So I’m thinking either large parts of the original script for this thing didn’t get shot or did get shot and was left on the cutting room floor. It had to be one or the other because there were large chunks of this movie left with some rather large gaping holes. For instance the girlfriend is an investigative reporter and decides to investigate Emily which leads to a scene with Adrienne Barbeau which basically tells us nothing and leads to absolutely nothing. Perhaps originally this was to throw the reporter in the mix along with some intrigue, but whatever, it got cut. Then the Joe Pantoliano character disappears to take care of some guy that Dave just killed and clean up his mess, but that’s pretty much the last we see of him and whatever happened in that situation isn’t followed up at all. Speaking of the guy that got killed, there were photos of he and Emily having sex but why? It’s told to us the cop Pruitt was Emily’s ally in collusion and took all the photos, but were they trying to blackmail this dude? Who was he? And who in the hell goes to a police interrogation and admits to two murders so he can skate on an assault charge? This is what my man did since obviously Emily isn’t dead. And why are the cops so interested in getting this dude on an assault charge when he’s just closed out two murders for you anyway? For that matter, why did they even bother to setup Dave in the first place since the husband is out of the way and the loot is secure? Why the blackmail photos? Just grab your money and go. Everybody, including Dave lives out the rest of their lives and that other dude doesn’t have to die either.

The film does look nice, Ashley Scott is tall and pretty, Emmanuelle Chiriqui is shorter but prettier, Joe Pantoliano ain’t very pretty but he is awesome in almost everything he does with this being no exception, and the movie was mercifully brief. These few positives however cannot override a narrative that was pretty much broken from the first frame and left the poor audience asking way too many common sense questions for a movie that was ultimately pretty damn stupid.