When the Bough Breaks

For every great idea, there are a thousand cries of “me too!� Hollywood is no exception to this rule – hell, they helped invent the rule in many ways.

It’s 1977, and Star Wars has become a huge hit. “ME TOO!� cry a dozen producers, and soon everyone’s hastily signing contracts to produce anything as long as it’s got spaceships, planets and silly hairstyles in it. Dances With Wolves scores Kevin Costner a bevy of Academy Awards. “ME TOO!� scream the studio’s rivals, and suddenly there are more movies featuring wide open plains, gorgeous sunsets and John Barry Tribute Album music scores than you can wave a confederate flag at.

Silence Of The Lambs, a magnificently spooky thriller from the previously-thought-fluffy Jonathan Demme, was a surprise smash in 1991 and has become a bona fide classic. And somewhere deep in the bowels of Hollywood, a producer suddenly had an idea. “OH YEAH, ME TOO!!!� they suddenly remembered to yell, having forgotten the Hollywood version of crying “BINGO!� for a pregnant moment. “LET’S MAKE OUR OWN SPOOKY AND DARK FILM AND USE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS AS OUR TEMPLATE!�

And so they did. The resulting film, produced by short-lived studio Prism Pictures (also responsible for the likes of Night Eyes 3, Project Metalbeast and Sleepstalker, their films score an average of four out of ten from IMDB users), was When the Bough Breaks.

It seems like a reasonable enough prospect on the surface. After the discovery of several pairs of children’s severed hands in a dug-up sewerage pipe, local police Cap’n Bartlet… sorry, we mean Swaggert (Martin Sheen) is at a loss to find a culprit. And so well-regarded police “profiler� Audrey McLeah (Ally Walker, who several years later became well known to TV viewers as another Profiler on the show of the same name) is brought in to help put the pieces together. The fun really begins when Audrey pays a visit to a local mental hospital at the urging of President Bartl… err, Cap’n Swaggert, and finds the mute, curiously androgynous teenage boy Jordan there living alone in an underground isolation ward just like that chap in Silence Of The Lambs (Jordan is played by Tara Subkoff, who is very obviously not male and as a result instantly gives away a key plot element). Jordan carves pictures of hands into walls, stares out at the sun and clutches a decaying doll called Jenny. Audrey relates instantly, because she’s got scars all over her back and therefore “knows what it’s like to be alone� and the two soon hit it off. Jordan is apparently predicting stuff by writing it down on big bits of paper, though that’s never entirely clear; it’s clear enough for Audrey, though, who chain-smokes her way through the big signposted clues perfectly. She visits the obligatory Freaky Mysterious Slow-Motion Housekeeper With Gravity-Defying Grey Hair And Eyes Of Evil, goes straight from there to the scene of the crime, conducts an illegal search, breaks and enters and then breaks things, finds another dozen plot elements from Silence Of The Lambs in the basement along with Petrified Perky Walkman Ice Cream Girl, sets fire to the place and somehow never gets busted by internal affairs for being the world’s worst cop (hell, she doesn’t even try to arrest people – she just runs away or sets them on fire, proving in the process that cigarette smoking can save your life).

Writer-director Michael Cohn does seem to have set out to make a serious movie, and even has a few good ideas (the girl who finds the severed hand at the top of the film doesn’t squeal and scream, for example, but instead just stares at it solemnly), but you can’t be this obvious about trying to be Silence Of The Lambs and not get laughed out of the cinema. Even the character structure of the film – the young attractive female investigator getting the jump on all the jaded experienced policemen by wading in with the freaky people and solving the crime single-handedly – is the same. President Cap’n Bartlet-Swaggert never gets much of a look-in, and when he does it’s in a really silly ten-gallon hat and a bad Larry Hagman accent. The film’s title, by the way, refers to the nursery rhyme that Jordan scrawls on his cell wall – though it doesn’t actually have any relevance to the story at all.

Still, quite aside from the fact that it’s got Mr Sheen in it, some people obviously liked this low-budget non-thriller – a few years ago, a sequel was made with Kelly McGillis in the Audrey role. It premiered three years ago in April 1999.

On home video.

In Portugal.

Anyone who was seriously expecting a pristine anamorphic transfer of this late-night TV filler material is an optimist, but even the totally blind would deduce from the use of colour-photocopied artwork from the VHS version for the DVD’s back cover – and the words “also available on VHS� – that the transfer here is the same old full frame effort that was used for the tape version.

Of course, a look at the transfer itself would have you checking to make sure you’re not playing a videotape; while not bad as far as b-grade movie transfers go, this is a typically over-bright, over-edge-enhanced full-frame video transfer that looks its nine-year vintage despite a very clean print having been used. It would have been an excellent looking VHS tape for its time, but on DVD the tell-tale annoyances of bad telecine – the “gauze� on top of the picture, the slight colour bleed and instability, and the “mosquito noise� around sharp edges betray its origins. For the material it’s perfectly adequate, but it looks only marginally better than VHS.

The disc was authored by Melbourne outfit IML Digital Media, who we haven’t seen much from for a while. They’ve done the best they could with the material they were given (and have created some superb full-motion menu screens that are simply too good for the calibre of both the film and the transfer) but there is one instance of very noticeable macro-blocking, at the two minute mark on a lightning-lit shot of the severed hand. Yes, it that evil Enemy Of MPEG – the rain – at work yet again!

The film’s audio was mixed in “Ultra Stereo�, which is a Dolby-compatible (but cheaper to license) matrixed surround process that used to be extremely popular on low-budget US movies; naturally the audio here is surround encoded as well. The actual audio track on the DVD is a Dolby 2.0 stream without the Dolby Surround flag set, so digital decoder users will have to activate ProLogic surround decoding manually. Annoyingly, the audio track has been mastered with a very distinct bias towards the right channel, and while ProLogic’s rather clever channel steering can mostly correct this, it does lessen the effectiveness of the surround decoding. Those using bog-standard old Dolby Surround, meanwhile, will need to adjust their input balance towards the left to make this one decode properly.

Sound quality itself is typical of Ultra Stereo mixes on VHS – loud and compressed, and extremely “present� in the treble frequencies. It sounds, basically, like television.

There’s a bloody great big THX logo in the end credits; presumably this is meant to indicate that the sound facility used for the mix was THX certified, but perhaps someone just thought the logo looked cool.

No extra features, not even a trailer. The menus do have a small “ooh� factor though, so thank IML Digital Media for the generous awarding of a single extras point here.

Unless you’re a mad President Bartlet-Sheen fan, a Profiler groupie or just like rather slow-moving, poorly scripted and mostly boring thrillers, When the Bough Breaks is probably one you’ll want to settle for renting, or at best pick up when you see a copy in the two dollar bin. Force Video’s DVD is the circular silver equivalent of the VHS tape, no more and no less.