Touches You

Excellent adaptation.

Absolutely brilliant

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

After her striking performance as Matt Dillon's unrepentant junkie nympho wife in the outstanding "Drugstore Cowboy" Kelly Lynch seemed to have one hell of a career ahead of her. Then along came the hilariously horrendous "Roadhouse" and Kelly's credibility as a serious actress went straight down the toilet. Well, it's a good thing that this deservedly obscure pot-holocaust sci-fi stinker never received much attention or otherwise Kelly would probably have never had a career to begin with.Lynch makes her unpromising and unprepossessing acting debut as Osa, who struggles to survive in your typically bleak, rotten and exacting desolate wasteland environment in which hope, jobs and especially water have become exceedingly scarce. Osa's family gets slaughtered by a bunch of mean, sneering, sadistic thugs (Bill Moseley, Chop Top in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2," pops up as one of the evil leering goons). After being trained to be proficient with a crossbow by obnoxiously hearty old coot Trooper, Osa proceeds to enact a harsh revenge on the thugs. Man, is this one beat flick: the leaden pace, dreadful dialogue ("What are we going to do with you? You ugly bag of sick s**t!"), wooden acting, drab, plain cinematography which gives the film a bland, homely look (the fact that the picture was shot on cheap, grainy film stock doesn't help matters any), curious lack of any hard, rough elements which could have supplied some desperately needed gritty conviction, an obvious climax that's telegraphed well in advance (so much for tension), the meandering narrative, very colorless one-note characters (the head nasty, snarling homosexual villain is actually named Mr. Big!), poorly staged action scenes, bad guys who are too clean-cut and generic to be genuinely menacing, and, most damagingly, writer/director Oleg Egorov's pitiful inability to blend a hackneyed vengeance premise with a comparably threadbare post-nuke scenario with any flair, style, momentum or innovation all add up to one astoundingly crummy and unrewarding waste of time bomb. To sum up, this hideously lousy loser proves to be every bit as flat, arid and dreary as the barren, godforsaken desert landscape it takes place in.