Held Captive

Once in a while I come across a film that I'm not real sure how I should feel about it. This is usally because of the subject matter but it can also include how well it was acted or how well the effects were done. Starved (2000) was one of those films for me. This time around it had to do with the subject matter for the film more than anything. To me, it boarders on thriller and horror. As another reviewer noted, Starved will probably be more disturbing to women than it will be to men in general. Not saying men are cold hearted but I just can't picture a man in the same type of situation. Do I have your attention yet? If I do then that is what I was hoping for.

Starved is basicly about three people. We first meet Monica Andrews (Lee Anne Beaman). We discover that she works in an office and has a few friends there including her best friend Jane (Toni Zobel). Monica meets Scott (Hal Adams) at a bar one night and is a bit put off by him because he is video taping his conversation with her. She finaly gets him to turn the camera off and seems to loosen up once she thinks it is off and proceeds to answer the personal questions that Scott asks. She feels he is a nice guy even though he was being a bit creepy with the video camera and the date for the next two weeks. Scott invites Monica to a home cooked meal and even sends her a bunch of roses as a reminder. Monica doesn't tell her coworkers a whole lot about Scott, they don't even know his name. This only adds to the problem when Monica suddenly disappears. No one seems to know what happened to her and the police, under maned and 100s of missing persons cases, are not being much help so Jane tries taking matters into he own hands to find out what happened to Monica.

We already know what is going on with Monica. She was druged and wakes up in Scott's basement. At first she is free to move around but soon enough she wakes up with shackles around her ankles. What follows is Scott trying to break Monica down. He only gives her bread and water to eat at first. Once her gums start to bleed, he starts to give her vitamine pills. He starts to try and convince her that she is not Monica at all, Monica is dead and all her friends don't know who she is. As he gets her to admit she is no longer Monica, he tries to get her to think that she is his sister Sarah and that his name isn't Scott at all. Will Scott manage to make Monica into Sarah or will Monica fight back and be saved by Jane in time?

Since there is no real violence in Starved, there are little effects to be found. Scott isn't beating Monica or keeping her as a sex slave, he is trying to brain wash her. Sure he gets mad and throws his temper around but he never hits Monica or anything like that. They did do a wonderful job of showing Monica getting weaker and almost ageing as she is deprived of real food. The only other effect is when Scott gets so frustrated and mad that he cuts open his own hand. Made me squirm a bit watching him stitch it back up himself. The acting was also very well done. According to IMDb, this was the last movie that Lee Anne Beaman was in which is a shame. I don't know how she did in her other movies (one reviewer said she had small parts and was usually nude) but she did do a wonderful job in this movie.

As I said, I'm not sure about this movie. I liked it but I can't really decide if I should call it a horror movie or not. Sometimes a horror movie will leave me disturbed instead of scared in places but this whole movie was that way. I never felt scared by what was happening to Monica, I only felt an unease and disturbed by it. Should a movie that envokes those feelings be called a horror movie? I don't really know but it does have that label and I did watch the movie so here is the review for it here. I never really thought of these types of movies as horror movies but then again, I don't know how to label them.

The only problem I really see about Starved is that it comes close to being very boring. In truth, not a whole lot happens. No real action at any point in the movie. Some say you need something exciting happen in a movie in order to keep people from falling asleep. If you are one of those people then you might as well skip this movie. Still, even for me, one who doesn't need action to keep me interested (although it never hurts), I was getting close to being bored at times. Because of that I wasn't real sure how I should rate it. Not very many people rate this one very high. Netflix averages just above 2 stars and IMDb averages just above 3 stars so, for the most part, it isn't reguarded to highly. If this sounds like a movie you might like then I would suggest trying to find it. I do know Netflix carries it since that is where I got it from. One other small thing, at the start of the movie it claims what we will see was based on true events. At the end of the movie, durring the small print, it says that the story and people are fiction but the event really happened. So I assume they came across news account of something like this happening and made a story around that.
3 out of 5 Think I will find something to eat now