Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

As the thriller ‘iMurders’ opens a man, who is fully clothed, is having sex in an upstairs room with some blonde, who is partially clothed. Right off the bat I have a problem. Unless in it’s in alleys, public bathrooms, broom closets or quickies in the kitchen people usually don’t have sex with their clothes on. Not that I need to see some dudes hairy ass or yet another set of bare titties because that’s easy enough to track down if that’s what you’re looking for, but it does stem the realism of the situation when I see this. Just a personal thing I guess. Anyway some hostile woman busts up in the crib and yells at this dude who quickly apologizes for his transgression. The camera fades away and is followed by a gunshot and a woman’s scream. What in the world has happened?

Jump ahead some years later where we meet pretty event planner Sandra Wilson (Terri Colombino) who has just moved into a new place. Her busy body landlord, Ms. Jensen (Joanne Baron), makes it a point to get all up in girlfriends business but seems most intrigued by her knowledge of computers, especially considering Ms. Jensen is a total dunce in all matters technological.

Now we get introduced the virtual army of characters in this flick, the majority of whom are Sandra’s ‘FaceSpace’ buddies. Without getting into all of them there is damaged supermodel Linda Jeffries (Gabrielle Anwar) who is working with shifty lawyer Robert Delgado (Billy Dee Williams) to get her just reward. There’s also philandering college professor Dr. Uberoth (William Forsythe) who spends the majority of his spare time hanging out in chat rooms and sexing any and everybody except Mrs. Uberoth (Margaret Colin). There are more members of this group but somebody’s going around killing them so we’re not going to worry about them too much with the question being whose killing them and why.

This situation brings Sandra’s handsome neighbor into play, former cop Joe Romano (Frank Grillo), who Sandra has marked as her territory. Thing is Joe is the tortured sort, still attempting to recover from the murder of his police officer brother, a murder that his FBI agent sister Lori (Brooke Lewis) and her partner Agent Washington (Tony Todd) are on the verge of cracking. Mabye. I don’t know. Beats the hell out me. I haven’t even mentioned the strange janitor, the nutty lesbian Asian chick in therapy or the bonus blonde chick that floats in and out of this movie. I really don’t know what purpose any of them served.

Aside from the relatively weak title I did have some hope for this movie ‘iMurders’. First of all this is a movie with both William Forsythe and Tony Todd in it’s cast in addition to an interesting launching point for movie, this being some loon offing obnoxious Facebook people. Who wouldn’t want to see that? So it brings me very little joy to inform you that ‘iMurders’ was damn near unwatchable. The number one issue that I saw with this movie is that the narrative was literally all over the freaking place. Director and co-writer Robbie Bryan has a movie that has so many plot elements and introduces us to so many characters that it becomes a true task to attempt to keep track of it all without a scorecard. I figure we have to deal with all these branching storylines and characters, so that there are a subsequent number of red herrings to throw in our path since it is a mystery and all with the audience charged to figure out this mystery, but all this served was to add confusion and bewilderment to the story as opposed to genuine intrigue. Not unlike an episode of ‘Murder She Wrote’ everything gets neatly explained in the end, but unlike Angela and them this neat explanation actually adds to the confusion if you stop to think about for just a brief minute. Something I don’t recommend that you do. But I did this which raised a few logic issues for me. SPOILERS TO FOLLOW: So our crack FBI team thinks that the pretty blonde is the murderer considering her car was at the murder scene in Boston. Hell if I remember where this movie takes place. The pretty blonde claims she was planning an event in D.C., where she flew to, and left her car at home. Now I’m no FBI agent but they got this newfangled technology called ‘The Telephone’ in which you can simply call the alleged ‘event’ this woman has claimed she was planning to verify this. Event Planning is fairly high profile so if she wasn’t there planning this event she would’ve been missed. The alleged airline would’ve also known if she caught that plane or not. The Telephone would’ve solved all of this.

At the end of the movie we find out that Ms. Jensen is indeed the killer and was the woman who showed up at the beginning catching her brother doing our pretty blonde event planner, with the brother subsequently killing himself. I’m thinking I’d have remembered what this woman looked like considering she was calling me all kinds of whores and whatnot, and considering we were there together when some dude blew his own head off. I’m not forgetting the details of this scenario no matter what color this woman changes her hair to. Then our poor cop thinks he killed the pretty blonde when in actuality it was Ms. Jensen hiding off to the side behind the blonde, who was the triggerman. I’m thinking if a bullet enters the back of somebody’s head and I’m standing in front of them with my gun, even if my gun went off… I probably didn’t fire the killshot. But then I’m not a CSI agent so what the hell do I know. There’s stuff like this all over this movie that’s going mess with your logic gene but if you don’t let it enter your head, like I allowed it to enter mine, you might be all right.

Also, since the movie was jumping around to so many characters and paying service to so many storylines it was difficult for it get any kind of rhythm or pacing so the whole flow of the movie just felt off. It all seemed a lot slower and lot more static than the various storylines dictated it should have been which didn’t help matters either.

‘iMurders’ was a disappointment, no way around that. Forsythe faired well as did Todd in a limited role and Terry Colombino and Brooke Lewis are both pretty damn hot if we’re looking for positives. Plus it’s good to see that Billy Dee is still alive. Thus ‘iMurders’ is worth watching if you need confirmation that Billy Dee Williams is still alive, and in that sense… it’s almost worth it.