From my favorite movies..

Brilliant and touching

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Yes, the popular opinion on this board is correct - despite some good acting (with what they had to work with, I mean), this film is rubbish. It's nothing you have not seen before except with prettier kids.Like another reviewer I only got it see Morgan Fairchild and Joan Van Ark, both of whom look good but have very small parts. Fairchild looks lovely but has only 3 scenes; Van Ark plays her standard quivering mother with a similar number of scenes - she does not even get to react to the "twist" at the end! As for Dennis Hopper, it's a part he could play in his sleep. Obviously this was one of those "pay the mortgage" films.To be fair though, some of the music on the soundtrack is okay.

Wow... nine comments thus far, and four of them are positive. (Well, maybe three... it's hard to tell if that "4/5" rating is supposed to be read as "four out of five" or "four-fifths of a point", presumably on a scale of 1 to 7319.) Consider this my attempt at tipping the balance back a bit closer to where it should be, namely in the "If you value your sanity or self-respect, for gawd's sake stay away from this load of crap!" category.If I had to say something positive about the movie, though, I would point out that my roommate and I had a perfectly good time trying to remember what those bayou-trash boats that look like they have lettuce centrifuges nailed on sideways behind the driver's seat are called, and that we enjoyed hurling abuse and obscenities at the screen throughout the movie. Oh, and it also ended before the tape ran out.Bad things: not only does the teen starlet who has to strip down to her underwear not get mauled by baboons or fed to the Sarlacc, but you're also forced to spend the better part of an hour pretending that you are going to be surprised when the unscrupulous parental unit with the failing business turns out to be the guy responsible for the brilliant kidnapping plot that involved traveling into the swamp to find some toothless crazies who will kill a couple of people in order to net himself a tidy ransom. Also, I don't believe that any of the cast or crew were injured by flying circular-saw blades during the making of this movie, and that's an injustice of cosmic proportions.

I will never stop wondering why a basically good actor like Dennis Hopper finds himself in a movie like this. Several things aren't just awful, but really, really bad: - the plot, - the acting, - the music, - the script, - etc etc The movie is rated 16+ (why? the once-in-a-while "f***-s" in it?); 12 year olds might be excited by the teen-actors. The story would most likely bore. A 3 out of 10.

Held For Ransom starring Zachery Ty Bryan, Jordan Brower, and Randy Spelling, among others is set in the swamps of Florida. It centers around five high school students whose school bus is hijacked on the way home when they are the last of the passengers. The five teenagers taken off the bus, tied up, and taken deep into the swamps to a small house where they are to be held hostage. The kidnappers take an instant disliking to their male hostages. While the girls are untied, the three boys have their hands tied behind their backs the entire movie. The boys spend more than a few scenes locked in a small, hot shed. Bryan is even threatened with an alligator. The film has a basically good story. However, it is ruined by frequent use of foul language.