Screenhead

There is a very short list of actors that I keep on hand…actors who I can count on to deliver an excellent performance no matter how bad the rest of the movie around them is.  This list includes luminaries like Tiffany Shepis, Brad Dourif, Jeffrey Combs, and William H. Macy.

Also on that list is Lance Henriksen, a man who can be counted on, and his skills will be sorely tested in the mixed bag that is Necessary Evil.

This one pits a budding journalist against a sprawling pharmaceutical corporation who’s deeply at work on something that turns out to be a lot more sinister than anyone wanted to give it credit for.  But the journalist and the corporation have a lot more history together than anyone was aware of, and over the course of the movie we’ll discover just what that history is.

Once again, Lance Henriksen will turn in an excellent performance, even if the rest of the movie around him is quite a bit more hit and miss.  See, the really weird thing about this one is that sometimes, it’ll be fun and entertaining and a little scary.  Other times it’ll be weird, hallucinatory and downright incoherent.  The ending might well be the most entertaining part of the whole thing, even if it does sort of kick up the foreboding a skosh for a possible sequel not too far down the line,  an announcement which hit me with a whole busload of mixed feelings.

And that leaves me with one big problem–recommend or not.  Well, I’ll be honest with you–you can do a WHOLE LOT better than this.  But you can also do plenty worse.  And Lance Henriksen fans like myself will be more than happy to know that he’s STILL good.

The Screenhead Ten Scale washes its hands of the whole mess and awards Necessary Evil a five out of ten for averaging out to purely mundane.

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