Antoinette Valente in Red Letters (2000)

Clips

Review

The bad news: they were not smart enough to avoid casting Pauly Shore.

The good news: they were smart enough not to mention it! He is uncredited.

The opening sequence is marvelous. A stark naked coed sits on her professor's desk, reading him erotic excerpts from his own fiction.

As the scene progresses, we realize that he broke off an affair with her, she is using his own words to show him how hurt she is, and she intends to file a sexual harassment suit against him.

If only the rest of the movie had that level of imagination, eroticism, and poetry. As it stands, it's a movie that's good enough to sit through if it pops up late at night, but isn't good enough to go out of the way for.

Mostly it's just another made-for-cable thriller in which Peter Coyote, a noted Hawthorne scholar (hence the title) with a weakness for young girls, finds himself enmeshed deeper and deeper into criminal activities beyond his depth. The plot requires plenty of coincidences and incredible behavior.

Dismissed from one university in disgrace, Coyote gets enmeshed in the entire plot by reading the mail of the guy who used to live in his apartment (Pauly Shore). Seems that Pauly was corresponding with a woman in prison for murder (Nastassja Kinski), and was going to help her with something, but changed his mind. Coyote writes the woman and offers to help her in any way he can.

Turns out that Kinski and her sister manipulate Coyote and his hacker friend (Jeremy Piven) into engineering a jailbreak. Piven finds it simple to hack the prison records and arrange for Kinski's release. Then Kinski manipulates Coyote some more, and the dramatic tension of the plot centers around this question - "is Kinski just a manipulative killer, or is she really telling the truth about her innocence?".

One of the more incredible plot twists involves the policeman who captures Coyote for abetting Kinski's escape and for conspiracy to commit another murder which Kinski committed while she was out. (She says it was self-defense). The detective just lets Coyote go, even though all the news reports have declared him a killer, on Coyote's promise that he'll turn himself in within two days if he can't solve the crime!

Of course wimpy English teacher Coyote has as much chance of catching hardened criminals as his Uncle Wily has of catching that roadrunner, but he beats the odds, as I'm sure you have guessed.

Nudity Report: Antoinette Valente is the hot red-head in the marvelous opening scene stark naked, and the camera angles included a full-frontal . Nastassja Kinski did a sex scene where most of her breasts were showing, but I never saw any nippleage.

Critics Vote: No Major Reviews.

IMDB Summary: 5.3 out of 10

DVD Info: Has a lot of features for a made-for-TV film. Widescreen anamorphic, full-length commentary, stills gallery.

Written by: Scoopy …Scoopy.net