Director Steve Mudd’s DTV film ‘Seclusion’ is going to be a very difficult film to review.  You see it didn’t totally suck, at least as far as I’m concerned, but alternatively, it also wasn’t very good either.  It was obviously shot with a reasonably low budget, but taking that into consideration it looked pretty good, but still had a cheap, dramatized ‘America’s Most Wanted’ sheen to the look of the film.  The acting in the film was certainly competent, but also wasn’t stellar either.  The story driving the narrative wasn’t very compelling, but it fit with what the filmmakers were working with.  In truth, ‘Seclusion’ was just kind of ‘there’.

Christopher Stapleton plays Congressman Robert Hamilton (a very congressional sounding name isn’t it?) who is trailing in the polls for the race for the senate of some unnamed state with just two months to go until the election.  With the biggest speech of his campaign coming up Congressman Matthews, his campaign manager the completely uptight Mike Richards (Jefferson Arca), and his altogether too loose chief communications officer Corin Matthews (Missy Crider) decide to go up to a remote cabin, knuckle down and get busy to create a speech that’s going get the electorate on fire!  But you know how it can be when you can’t get those old creative juices flowing, you some times have to switch to external stimuli to get the ball moving a little bit.  Fortunately for these cats the completely whorish Corin is loaded down with illegal drugs!  This is a politician who is most definitively inhaling.  So Corin supplies our crew with a combination of marijuana and her own brand of sugar cube sweetened absinthe to cure the writers block.  Hey, if it were available I’d sure as hell take it to help finish this review.  I can’t tell if it helped them out or not, but they sure

did start acting silly.  Except the uptight dude.  But it gets worse for our potential senator.  In one of those things you notice in movies, Corins’ rather large handbag is lying conspicuously on the kitchen counter.  It’s so large that it’s hard to miss and of course you know it’s going to play a role in our proceedings in some way or the other.  Fiending for some poisonous homemade absinthe, our future senator finds they are out of sugar cubes to sweeten it with.  Wouldn’t you know that the whorish Corin has sugar cubes in her ridiculously large handbag?  We all know those aren’t regular sugar cubes and now our senator is drugged out on weed, poison liquer AND acid.  His ‘friends’ knowing they can’t take him to the hospital because it would ruin the election decides to wait around and hope it wears off.  So if he manages not to wake up dead the next morning, it’s all good and the crisis in averted.

During that night something really bad happens.  When the Congressman wakes up Corin is missing, though her car is still there at the cabin as well as her obnoxiously large handbag.  He can’t remember anything but obscure flashbacks.  Next thing Corin’s insanely violent and jealous husband shows up out of blue wanting to know where his wife is.  He thinks the wife is having an affair with someone, but he would be wrong.  His wife is having an affair with EVERYONE.  Also showing up is the Congressmans wife who finds a diaphragm on the floor and starts jumping to wild conclusions that someone is having sex.  To cut this short, folks start acting super crazy, people start dying, things get resolved and the credits roll.

I’m still not sure who did what to Corin, but then I did walk out of the room for a few minutes and didn’t feel the need to rewind.  Everything I had to say about how I felt about this film I said in my first paragraph.  ‘Seclusion’ is about as generic as entertainment gets.  Had Director Mudd been able to cast Bruce Boxleitner and Meredith Baxter Birney in this thing, the Lifetime Network would have swooped it up with no questions asked.  It’s a totally inoffensive film with no nudity, no real violence and a little profanity.  I guess the drug usage may offend some, but they took care of that little minx who was supplying the contraband for real!

On a slightly related note as I was on the IMDB getting my background information on the cast and the like, I noticed that in the little forum for this film Steve Mudd actually jumps into the conversation with the internet posters, most of whom have very little nice to say about his film.  DON’T EVER DO THIS!  Steve, these people are anonymous and as such will say the worst things to you, about you, about your family...  they will curse you, belittle you in a barrage of grammatical errors and damn you.  They are anonymous.  Anonymity brings out the absolute WORST in people for some reason.  Racism, sexism, and a complete lack of reason are all par for the course.  This anonymous unwashed mass will say some of the ugliest things about people they do not know and will never meet.   If you must entertain comments on your film, start your own private board on your films website, one that you can control.  NEVER participate in public forum about yourself.  Anonymity.  It just isn’t a good thing.