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Brilliant and touching

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

A last-ditch entry into the 'erotic thriller' genre that started back in the early 1990s when the likes of BASIC INSTINCT popularised the genre. BARE WITNESS is lamentable in every respect: a rubbish, predictable storyline, gross sex scenes, cardboard acting, and thrills that'll make you laugh rather than jump.The villain of the story is a corrupt mayor who attempts to murder a rival; unfortunately for him, the assassin is caught on a sex tape filmed by a high class hooker. Soon enough the hunt is on for the tape as the hooker's friend and a cop join forces to help bring down those responsible.Everything about the film screams bargain basement and the shoddiness is unbelievable. The sex scenes are about as explicit as they can be in a non-pornographic production and yet they're deeply silly and/or sleazy, depending on your taste. Angie Everhart is about as appealing as a 2x4, while a chubby Daniel Baldwin wanders around and must be wondering what happened to his career. Unfortunately there's absolutely nothing to recommend about this one, which has to be the nadir in the careers of all involved.

A stripper/porn actress/call girl (Catalina Larranaga) sets up a video camera for her session with a hit-man client (she is a free-spirit making a "documentary" about her life). The tape keeps running after his boss (a corrupt land developer) and a bald, stocky henchman arrive to discuss a job that night and she is kicked out of the hotel room. Later, the hit-man shows up dressed as a waiter at a dinner party for a do-gooder mayoral candidate, and fires in the candidate's direction but instead wounds the city council chairman.Plump, stubble-faced cop Daniel Baldwin is cooling his heels outside the mansion, punished for having in the past mouthed off to the P.R.-obsessed mayor. To further establish him as a crude, irreverent he-man, Baldwin's character relieves himself on some bushes. Upon hearing the gunshots, he circles the house, notices an open kitchen window, and tries but fails to catch the shooter.When the hit-man later remembers the camera (for some reason he let the hooker set it up), and tells his boss it is now gone, the boss's slinky hellcat henchwoman (Laurin Reina) shoots him dead. The boss visits the set of a sleazy movie being produced by fat slob "Slim," who sometimes used Larranaga in his films. She soon arrives, dropped off by her concerned roommate, Angie Everhart, a bartender with a checkered past. Claiming to be a film producer, the boss abducts and kills Larranaga.Baldwin pointlessly gives Everhart a hard time in the police interrogation room. For no apparent reason, he completely changes to a softy when he takes her home. In some awkward scenes, the two become romantically involved, as she falls into danger from Reina and the stocky henchman, who are searching for the missing tape.Along the way, Reina turns on her boss. She attempts to lure low-life Slim into helping her find the tape, only to have him threaten to tell her boss (who he is already blackmailing), so she blows Slim away.Conveniently, a neighbor's question clues in Everhart that her dead roommate had taken her VCR to a repair shop with a tape stuck in it. Everhart recovers them. But just as she is watching the tape, Reina and the henchman loudly approach the house where she is staying, and, after a seemingly endless car and foot chase, abduct her (but not before she slips the tape to a bystander who passes it along to Baldwin). Baldwin has also learned that the real estate developer wants a highway built to a casino project in the desert and has made enormous campaign contributions to both the incumbent and the challenger.In the film's climax, Baldwin gives the tape to Reina in exchange for Everhart, who has "made a deal" with Reina (but what about the stocky henchman?). They rush to the scene of a victory dinner for the mayoral challenger and foil a clumsy attempt on her life by the developer himself, with the henchman back in tow with him. It turns out that the city council chairman was in the developer's pocket and would become mayor when the mayor-elect died. Baldwin and Everhart merely shrug as Reina runs scot-free over to a CNN news crew to sell the tape.Amazingly, the movie manages to be mildly enjoyable. The cast is a bunch of unknowns, and the title, acting, and story are lame. Baldwin is not cut out for the role of a rugged, romantic leading man. He seems to jump in and out of trying to play a character and mostly ends up acting as if he had been hauled in off the street to play himself. He comes across best as a messy, soft-spoken guy with some problems. His romance with Everhart is rushed and implausible. Her performance skates on the surface of a thin role. With a line-delivery that sometimes seems to miss a beat, she tries a little too hard to be serious and purposeful. But I was more impressed with her seriousness than with her plainer-than-expected looks. A feisty female detective is okay, but Willie Gault is a total dud as Baldwin's partner.The other characters, including Baldwin's gruff chief, are bland or exaggerated cardboard cut-outs. The developer acts like a big-shot but never does anything smart. His murder plot is based on a skimmed-over, cliché motive and is confusing and sloppy (he arranges either to make or fake an attempt on the challenger's life before she has even won; it is unclear whether shooting the councilman was even intended, and, annoyingly, Larranaga's tape sounds garbled on this point). The plan serves only to put the police on notice that she is a target, and the payoff is simply and unbelievably luring her out of a dinner party alone with a cell phone call for him to pull the trigger on her himself. He seems clueless in the tape search and about Reina's scheming.Reina is sexy and spirited enough to be fun to watch. But to suggest, as one review does, that simply because, without explanation, the movie lets her get away clean with known, multiple murders, kidnapping, assault, and robbery, that this is some sort of profound statement about life, rather than just flip, half-baked writing, is straining to find meaning in all the wrong places. Whether or not something "happens a lot in real life" does not, as the review assumes, automatically make it meaningful, interesting, entertaining, or credible when made the subject of a particular work of fiction.Overall, there are enough threads to the story, and enough colorful caricatures on the make on the wild side, to hold some interest. Because of the involved plot, and because Baldwin, Everhart, and Larranaga make likable enough "good guys" to root for against the various "bad guys," the clumsy weaknesses can more easily be taken in stride as something fun to laugh at. This is an above-average, 4-star entry in a low-budget, formulaic, exploitation genre.

(Some Spoilers) Doing a documentary on L.A prostitution striper and part-time call girl Julie Spencer,Catalina Larranaga, has all her "tricks" or customers taped with a hidden camcorder while their both doing "it". Getting into hot and heavy action with her "John" a hyped up Gav Reed, Mark Silvertsen, the two are interrupted and Juile is told to wash up and leave. It turns out that big city real-estate tycoon Ian Hunter and one of his henchmen Nix, Even MacMenzie & Robert McRay, pay Gav a visit talking over a contract hit of mayoral candidate Mary Washington, Angela Sargeant, that's to take place that evening, all this is being secretly taped by Julie's hidden camcorder.Rav goes to a campaign dinner, disguised as a waiter, for candidate Washington and shoots City Councilman, in fact the City Council President, Frank Constantine (Don Short) who got in the line of fire injuring him. Later Rav is killed by Hunter's hoods to keep him quite if he decided to spill the goods on, or blackmail, the person who paid him to assassinate, which he failed, candidate Washington.Hunter later that evening goes to Julie's place of work, a sleazy L.A bar where she's a stripper, and asks the owner Slim (Joe Constanza), who's anything but, that he's a movie producer and want's to borrow her, at a good price, for the evening in a porno flick that he's doing. Julie like Rav ends up dead with a bullet in the head and dumped in a dumpster not far from Slim's bar.It's then when Hunter somehow finds out about the tape and has his hoods break into Julie's apartment. After knocking out both her roommate Carly, Angie Everheart, and Det. Killian (Daniel Baldwin), who was there interviewing her about Julie's murder, they take all of her secret tapes. It's only later that that it's discovered that it's the wrong tape! Not the tape with Hunter giving Rav the letdown and instructions on killing Mary Washington. The films plot has bit more meat to it, besides the graphic sex scenes, then you would have expected from a soft-core porn movie with a good twist ending that you realize is coming long before the movie "Baer Witness" ends.Both Danial Baldwin & Angie Everheart do their best to make the film believable with Baldwin's impression of a rebel ,do what I wanna do, cop and Everheart's of an ex-hooker with a heart of gold bartender and part-time stripper. Hunter wanting to have a road built from L.A to a desert casino that he owns plays both sides, running for L.A mayor, against the middle to get whoever gets elected to do his bidding. The fact that the attempted assassination of Mary Washington was a failure and City Councilman Frank Constanstine, who was the one that Hunter really wanted to be mayor, was wounded played right into Hunter's hands. This all set things up up the real attempt to murder Washington at the end of the film. Finding the missing tape in a electronic store where Julie had her VCR sent to have the tape, that was stuck inside, removed has Hunter and one of his cronies Marina, Lauren Reina, chase Carly all through L,A. Hunters attempt to retrieve and destroy the incriminating tape before it's made public eventually blows Hunter's grand plan to control whoever becomes mayor and pull his, or her, strings to do whatever he want's him, or her, to do. Slim earlier got wise to Hunter's plans, after Det. Killian and his partner Det. Daulton (Willie Gault) paid him a surprise visit, ends up getting whacked by Marina to keep him from blackmailing her boss who she later sells out. Marina ends up selling the incriminating and politically explosive video tape to CNN News Network,for a hefty fee.

Spoilers herein.Naturally, you already know this is worthless.The story is a simple shuffle of the `implicating tape' hassle -- its amazing how often this happens (this time with the killer's name scrawled in blood). There's other self-reference: Angie as a former `actress' that couldn't hack it. A fat slob that's her `producer' who is just like Baldwin only moreso. Her character's aversion to making sex films, precisely the opposite of the actor's.I've slogged through a few of Angie's projects, and its interesting to see her work. Her job has nothing to do with the character, but to make herself look appealing. Any actress knows that film beauty is a manufactured product. Most work with a single facial feature and build a whole person around it. Angie acts with her hair. See how she arranges to have it lit according to the Hepburn formula. She has very little to work with actually.There's a very minor role here by someone named Nellie Sciutto. She's a secretary and she actually tries to act. Makes everyone else look bad.Ted's Evaluation: 1 of 4 -- You can probably find something better to do with this part of your life.