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50%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #15,518
...out of 20,886 movies
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Kim was abducted 20 years ago. She managed to escape but the kidnapper was never caught or seen again! Now 20 years later the memories still haunt her.
--IMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: April 17, 2011
If I told you, right here in the first sentence of the opening paragraph, that Sickened was a psychological slasher flick with a couple of kills, one particularly bloody scene, and tons of T&A, old-school slasher fans would probably stop reading and set out to track this one down. They might have some pause when I said that it was also full of horrible acting, a nonsensical plot, and it was all filmed on an insanely low budget, but hey - those things didn't hurt every other slasher flick in existence, did they? Unfortunately, when you combine all of these flaws together and magnify them, they do hurt the film in a bad way.
Unless I spoil the ending, which I'm not sure I could even do considering I didn't really understand what the filmmaker was going for, the synopsis for this one is going to be short. It centers around Kim (Nancy Feliciano), a young lady who was abducted by a serial killer twenty years ago and who barely managed to escape him with her life. He was never caught, and now she is plagued by nightmares about the event, nightmares that are sometimes so horrible that she has trouble differentiating between dream and reality. She talks through her problems with her best friend Charlene (Debbie D), she eventually meets a cable guy (director Phil Herman), and... except for the ending, that's about it. Tiffany Sinclair and Joel D. Wynkoop show up in brief cameo appearances.
Sickened runs for sixty-one minutes, so I was sort of expecting a brief tale that moved along nicely and wasted no time in spilling its secrets. What I got was a heavily padded film that moved along at a snail's pace for most of the running time. For example, we'll watch the leading lady take a shower, get out, get dressed, go for a run on the beach, come home, get undressed, take another shower, get out, get dressed, and then talk on the phone for a while. It's as exciting as it sounds (maybe less so - see my thoughts on the nudity in the next paragraph), and this is but one example of how ten minutes can go by with absolutely nothing of interest happening on the screen.
So, about that nudity. Let's get this out of the way right up front: I love boobs. I enjoy seeing the leading ladies in a film participate in a shower scene or go on a naked romp through the woods, so the movie scored points with me when the ladies started stripping just minutes into the running time. Both of the leads are moderately attractive - maybe not perfect tens, but they were by no means dogs either. The problem, therefore, is simple: midway through the film, I had to double-check that it was indeed entitled Sickened and not Nancy Feliciano Gets Naked. The woman gets three or four shower scenes, and I shit you not, we watch her get undressed and then dressed again no less than ten times in the hour that the movie runs for. This isn't even counting the handful of nude runs through the woods and I totally left out Debbie D's scenes, so needless to say, even the nudity starts to feel like padding after a short while in front of the tube.
As for the storyline, it's basically fifty-five minutes of padding and nudity with five minutes of honest-to-goodness plot progression, and as mentioned earlier, I'm not totally sure what the filmmaker was going for with the story conclusion. There are a couple of ways that one could interpret the ending, and maybe Herman was going for an open ending where it is up to the viewer to decide what really happened, but honestly, I may have missed something due to the audio levels. This is one of those films where the editors decide to just let the score continue playing while the actors are trying to talk, resulting in dialogue getting drowned out by music. This isn't a problem throughout most of the movie, but it does hurt during the climatic showdown between heroine and villain.
Overall, I'm going with a "pass" on Sickened. Writer / director Phil Herman apparently came up with a neat idea for a storyline (it does shine through from time to time), but he needed to put a little more meat on that bone in order to produce a captivating film. The insane amount of nudity hurts the overall product (I never thought I'd say that), and the lack of actual substance and red stuff didn't do it any favors either. It's not the worst micro-budget indie film that I have seen in my time, but it is by no means a shining example of what the territory can provide either. 3/10.
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