Kimberly Rowe in Second to Die (2002)

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Second to Die (2001) is a straight to vid thriller staring Erika Eleniak as the sister who is discovered dead in the opening scenes. Kimberly Rowe is really more of a plot device than a character, and serves as the audience point of view and the naked person. Rowe is swimming at night in the rain as her artist boyfriend paints her when she gets a page, and finds that her sister is dead. She rushes home to her alcoholic mother that she lives with and cares for, and discovers and starts reading her dead sisters diary. Along the way, we learn that Rowe works in a cocktail lounge, gets no respect from her mother, and has a low self-image growing up in the shadow of her older sister, who has married into money and lives in a big house.

Things were not all candy and roses with Eleniak. She was forced to take care of her husbands severely retarded and wheel-chair bound daughter from a previous marriage, and the husband is distant, cold, gone a lot, and has made her sign a pre-nuptial. She has an affair with a friend of her husband, and the two of them decide to off the husband and collect $2M in insurance. This makes the police suspicious, until they discover the policy had a second to die clause, which meant that the beneficiary only collected after the second one of them died. She then thinks someone is going to kill her.

I will stop there with the plot, as those of you less demanding of a thriller than I am may want to rent this. I didn't believe the Rowe character, as a young woman with great priorities and a sense of responsibility, who knew her sister was shallow and self-serving, and yet felt inferior to her. Eleniak's performance would have seemed poor even by hard core standards. Paul Winfield as a police detective, as sort of a Colombo-like character, was the most entertaining performance. This is barely a C. It has the genre essentials, including red herrings and plot twists, excitement and some suspense, and a supposedly surprise ending (which I guessed), but is nothing special.

Nudity Report: Eleniak kept her clothes on the entire film, but did look pretty good. Rowe gets out of the pool in wet panties with bush clearly visible through them, as well as buns, and has ok see-through in her colored t-shirt, then shows breasts and buns in a sex/after sex scene.


Written by: Tuna …courtesy of Scoopy.net