The review of Dangerous Cures, a television film where a young man left in a wheelchair is targeted by a sexy nurse with psychopathic tendencies. On Rai 2 and available on RaiPlay.
The young Tony Fox is a promise of athletics, but his dreams are in danger of shattering following a tragic event: one day, while he is in the car with his girlfriend Jasmine, he is the victim of an accident. She is mostly unharmed while he sustains more serious injuries, to the point that he may never walk again.
As we tell you in the review of Dangerous cures, Tony is now confined to a wheelchair, desperate for some revolutionary technique that can give him back the use of his legs. His mother Ellen is contacted by Daphne, a thirty-year-old nurse who proposes herself as the ideal candidate, available 24 hours a day, to take care of him and help him in his rehabilitation. However, the woman begins to seduce her helpless protégé day after day, eventually distancing him more and more from Jasmine and making him the protagonist of her crazy plan. Because Daphne is actually a psychopath who has already targeted her former patients in the past …
In the coils of madness
The beginning with a woman on the run in a wood is a copy/paste of multiple productions of the genre for the small screen, a topoi to which the director Jeff Hare – a true expert in the sector – he usually relies on opening his films. A short prologue after which Dangerous cures moves ahead six months, to introduce us to the beating heart of the narrative and the characters involved in it, with all the pros and cons of the case. A film that certainly can’t count on an excellent screenplay, with that key event triggering the incipit made and forced to say the least approximately, or the car accident in which poor Tony sees his dreams of glory potentially shattered .
Prisoner of madness, the review: an anonymous thriller
Eros from Thanatos
From that moment on, a sneaky game of seduction and madness took place, with the public already aware from the start of the sneaky psychological intrigues hatched by the villain, a ruthless dark-lady ready to do anything to succeed in her cruel intent, not looking anything or anyone in the face. Daphne is a sui generis villain, who in her extreme quest to take care of the sick develops an obsession that has much in common with the iconic Kinghian character played by Kathy Bates in Misery doesn’t have to die (1990), with the significant advantage of being able to count on a sexy and slender body.
Lean Van Mol is intriguing to the point in this over the top role, while the same cannot be said for the rest of the cast, with in particular Chris Cimperman too anonymous in the role of a victim of his own mistakes, naive and superficial on several occasions.
All normal
On the other hand, Dangerous Cures is an operation that pays off the so-called limits of the sub-strand, which have often been exposed in similar articles concerning productions for the small screen. A scholastic direction, a colorless suspense – with a lot of music to prepare for scares and/or twists – and a general lack of emotional impetus in the management not only of the protagonists but also of the story itself, which drags on without particular panache for the canonical, scarce, hour and a half of vision. Cultivating vision among other things the older woman wet dream – so to speak – that seduces the teenage boy, albeit with solutions that hide any potentially harder leap in favor of a general public-proof approach.
Conclusions
Paralyzed from the waist down following an accident, young Tony is entrusted to the loving care of a beautiful nurse, perhaps too loving. In fact, Daphne is a psychopath who has already seduced some of her patients in the past, with very disturbing intentions. As we told you in the review of Dangerous Cures, we are faced with a morbid thriller on paper, more or less coherently replicating the formula at the base of a prototype Mr. like Misery must not die (1990), but staged anonymously and without flashes, in the wake of the many stand-alone television thrillers designed for the small screen.
Because we like it
- Leann Van Mol is intriguing as the villain…
What’s wrong
- … but his character and the others are the victim of a little organic script.
- Flat direction, both in the tensive phases and in the pseudo-dramatic ones.