Skip to main content

Movie Review: Zero Effect

    Hey, everyone. Yet another weekend is drawing to a close. I want to tell you guys about a movie I watched the other night. The title was Zero Effect and it was on the Encore Channel.
     Bill Pullman stars as Darrell Zero, a really strange Private Investigator. The guy cannot interact well/at all with others. He has a hired hand by the name of Steve Arlo (Ben Stiller) who interviews potential clients and does the work that Zero doesn't want to do. Zero is the best detective in the world, a Sherlock Holmes caliber sleuth that never fails.
     Zero's latest case involves a client who has lost his keys. Gregory Stark (Ryan O'neal) is very secretive as to why the loss of his keys is so important but it seems that someone is blackmailing him with the information which the keys have given that thief access to. Zero is intrigued, but first must find out the secrets of Mr. Stark, in order to discover what he is being blackmailed with and who is doing the blackmailing.
     Darrell Zero, the reclusive detective, goes to the Pacific Northwest to delve into Stark's affairs. Zero becomes involved with a pretty paramedic lady who he suspects is involved in the blackmail scheme. She has been used to recover a money drop that Stark has made. It complicates matters when he is attracted to the girl, Gloria Sullivan (Kim Dickens). Zero is clueless with women. In fact, you might say he has zero experience. Ha, ha. But Gloria walks him through a relationship.
     Zero discovers that Stark had been in love with a woman while he was in college, back at Yale. This was 20 years earlier. The dirty Stark arranged to have the woman killed because she would have been an embarrassment to his rich family. Zero still couldn't put the case together because of the way that the crime scene had looked from 20 years before. The woman had been killed in a seedy motel and the bed had been turned cockeyed for no apparent reason. That seemingly innocuous fact was the focal point of the mystery.
    Will the ruthless Stark kill his own Private Investigator? Will Zero's helper quit his boss to please his hot girlfriend? Is anyone stupid enough to not look under their couch cushions for the keys that have been lost for two years? You'll answer these questions and more if you watch this movie.
      This film was one of those movies I had not seen or heard of. It was very good and I'd give it a 4 star out of 5 rating. If you are hanging around the house this week, pop over to blockbuster or somewhere and check it out. It is okay.
    From the author's green retreat, I'm CE Wills.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Biscuit

    Hey, everyone. What a relief that Christmas is over, huh? I don't think it was meant to be the way it is.     I started thinking about the so-called good 'ole days today. My wife says that at her house, they would take a left-over biscuit and shine their shoes before church. I one-upped her by saying, "Oh, yeah? I ate the biscuit when everyone got finished with it. And I was grateful for it." Truly, though, you can and people did, shine their shoes with a biscuit. Hey, they were greasy little buggers.     Speaking of greasy little buggers, I remember when everyone had wells and were very conservative about water, particularly those of us who had to crank a handle up and down to get a bucket of water. There was no daily bath. (No showers in those days, mate.) About twice a week we took a bath and here's the recipe: The oldest kid took a bath first, then the next oldest etc. You can see why younger siblings hated the older. Bathing in the...
Post a Comment
Read more

The White Chicken Mystery

    The other night I happened to come home very late. It was the middle of the night and I was driving up a steep mountain road. Near the top I saw something white in my headlights. It was standing in the other lane, standing very still. It was a large white chicken. It was probably a rooster because I thought I could see his comb as I whizzed by at my customary pace. He never moved a muscle. This is weird, don't you think?      After a couple of days to consider this phenomenon, I have come up with some plausible answers for his bizarre behavior. 1. He was conflicted whether or not he should cross the road. 2. He was feeling cocky and decided to play chicken with the traffic. 3.He was being hen-pecked at home and had decided to end it all. 4. Someone had egged him on to do it. 5. He had just watched the movie Fantastic Four and decided to try to stop a truck the way that Ben Grimm did on the bridge. 6. He had driven himself crazy wondering if ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sweet Run

   Hey, everyone. I have been playing quite a bit of games this weekend, as well as painting my house. Late last night I got on a sweet run on Nova 3 , the sci-fi shooter game. It's one of those games that has excellent graphics and feels like you have to advance inch by bloody inch. In a word, it is a pain in the butt.     For instance, I have been stuck on a Volterite spaceship for a month, wandering corridors over and over again like a lost puppy.     I finally cruised over to You Tube and watched a video walkthrough of the level. I eventually noticed that the guy picked up a piece of crystal from the floor in a dark corner of a 'solarium'. So, I went back to the game and at length came back to that area and picked up a crystal shard. Cool, right? I went on my way rejoicing in my heart. I had wild visions of advancing effortlessly through the remainder of this derelict ship and moving on to other exciting levels. Maybe I'd get to go to a dese...
Post a Comment
Read more