Right at Your Door

source: Right at Your Door

If you have not seen the film, only read the first two paragraphs: I can only say that this film gave me that feeling that we all hate, the same feeling as when you loose someone close to you or break up with a partner. It is not a happy feel good film, it is a brutal truth story, a story that takes you on a journey with a character that is in a situation I would not wish on anyone... Do not expect a happy ending, do not expect an action packed Hollywood film, this is neither. This film subtly shows us the mistakes a government can make and the turmoil many people would go through if chemical weapons were used. It is close to many things possible in these times in our world, It is an emotional and darkly visual film. I personally love it because it is the sort of thing that may get people who do not understand what is happening in the world thinking. It also shows that you do not need big budget explosions and gore to make people want to leave a room or cry. They do not hit on religious or terrorist actions at all, they do not bore you with government speeches, terrorist group names, they literally stick to the main three characters and their drive for survival. This film has without the use of special CG effects and high budget car chases, given me drive again, to value my family and friends and also it has renewed my thinking, made me believe in what I stand for... I stand for the everyday person on the street, the innocent effected by terrorism, extremism and governmental decisions. This film is about me, the everyday person from the street and nothing else... and the end shows us how caught up we are in someone else's business... We are people with no control in the end, and like 'Fight Club', 'V for Vendetta' and 'what to do in case of fire', this film shows us that you can try and do everything possible to change the world, but it still comes down to the powerful people, not us in the houses, the ones running the little shops and packaging the food, the ones building the powerful peoples buildings.

It doesn't take a big budget to make a good movie about what it would be like to be in a big city in a terror attack. Terror is after all, a personal emotion. Whatever the state of your relationship at that moment, that's where the picture freezes. You're not fully moved in, you hate your family, you had a fight... that's where things stand when the bombs go off. And if you're not blasted or burned or crushed in the initial blast, and if you're moderately resourceful, you'll find a way to survive -- for a while at least. And then you hope the 'authorities' do the right thing and come to save you. If you've thought about all of these things, you will appreciate how Chris Gorak plays it all out. This is not a movie for everyone. If you want all your questions answered, a big studio popcorn movie is probably more your style. But if you appreciate the exercise of putting yourself in the protagonist's shoes, this is a great ride.

Quite the solid independent disaster flick, Right at Your Door is a stellar example of making a limited budget work in your favor by effecting us more with two fine actor's insinuations then with huge, mass-extras-driven scenes. Chris Gorak, who has been involved behind the scenes with some modern day classics such as Fight Club and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, makes an impressively tense debut at the helm with this fast-paced, very realistic terrorism scenario executed over Los Angeles one day. From the outset Gorak infuses his survival drama with a tremendously brisk pace, highlighting the confusing and paralyzing fear which would engulf nearly everyone presented with the same scenario. Many parallels can obviously be made to the September 11th attacks as well as Gorak's not-so-subtle criticism of government rescue operations ala Katrina, but everything seems exploited in just the right way as to make the fear actually feel viable as we watch from the safety of our chairs. The third act does wind things down possibly a little too slowly compared to the full-throttle assault that was the first thirty minutes, although despite lapses in logic now and then I felt the movie represented an honest scenario the best it could up until a poetic, but underdeveloped and gimmicky ending.

The 9-11 experience has given new relevancy to movies about terrorist attacks. In Right at Your Door, writer and first-time director Chris Gorak shows the impact of a sudden attack in Los Angeles. Similar to Spielberg's War of the Worlds, Gorak chooses to focus exclusively on the impact of the events on one couple—Lexi, a professional woman who works downtown (Mary McCormack) and her husband Brad (Rory Cochrane), an out-of-work musician. Right at Your Door adeptly explores the human implications of a scenario that seems all too plausible in today's world. At the onset of the attack there is fear, panic, despair, disorientation and poor judgment. However, as the reality of the situation settles in, a survival instinct emerges, a certain calculating rationality. And finally, Brad and Lexi must face the many moral conflicts that can plague us in times of limited resources, dangerous conditions and life and death decisions. Layered on all of this are further apprehensions and uncertainties that must be dissected: Who can you trust? What does the government know? Whose advice do you listen to? What do we tell our friends and family? It is these issues that make viewing Right at Your Door a powerful and troubling experience. We see a little bit of ourselves in these characters, and it is easy to wonder how we would react in the face of these tragic circumstances. This movie will come back to you in moments of quiet contemplation. Gorak has made a very good movie, especially given his very limited budget and complete lack of directing experience (he been a production assistant on another movie, but has never directed anything before). I particularly like his decision not to provide any information about where the attacks came from. It's probably not all that realistic, as surely the media would be engage in non-stop speculation, but it served to focus the emotions on those things that really mattered to the characters. Interesting tidbit from the Sundance Q&A: Some of the scenes of smoke rising over the skyline used actual footage from the bombing in Iraq.

this has got to be the worst film i have ever seen! some say its a horror, I've seen more scarier things in my bin, than in this film. there was no suspense, no horror no plot! i had no sympathy for any of the characters,it was bad acting, directing, and writing! so the idea that this could really happen, was plausible, apart from that, there's nothing. the reviews in the UK said 'the twist is so good you don't see it coming' the fact that they point out there is a twist means that there is no twist, you see it coming a mile away! thats not a twist! please please please save your money, rent it if you want but do not go and pay to see this movie, you will regret it! 2.5 hours of my life i will never get back!

Well what can i say, i sat down in the cinema not knowing what to expect i'd never heard of the movie and had been convinced by a friend to watch it. as the movie started a terrible boredom set in, the script was unappealing, the camera work at times appalling, and the acting that of some 60's b-movie. now i've got to admit i saw lionsgate and thought oh thats the b-movie company, and i was surprised that they had made a non-horror movie for the cinema. but i gave them the benefit of the doubt. There was one moment throughout the whole movie when it evoked some emotion other then boredom and disgust, and that was when Lexi put her had through the back door and dropped the phone and contaminated ash in the house, i felt anger that she would do that to her husband who she supposedly loved (allthough i got no sense of any connection between her and her husband) i feel bad for the actors it was not there fault they got the parts, in fact i admire that they made the appalling script come to life, its not there fault it was badly written. but they need work, the characters were flat and 1 dimensional, i felt myself wanting to leave the cinema in disgust and demand my money back, but i felt myself thinking they could have an amazing ending and that would make up for hours of painful viewing, but i was wrong. the ending was woefully inadequate. the idea behind the movie was great, but it was pulled off in a amateur way. i've seen £100 budget movies that were better then this. if it had not been for the big screen i might have been able to cut it some slack but alas they even chose the format of release wrong. all in all i would recommend that no one watch this unless you are bored out of your mind and have too much money and not enough sense.

The film opens with an unemployed musician, played by Rory Cochrane who was great in A Scanner Darkly but can't seem to flesh out his hero here past a certain point, showing a tender servile nature by making a cup of latté for his wife Lexi, played by Mary McCormack, who is still in bed. She soon leaves for work and Cochrane is at home alone. Time passes and over the radio he hears that numerous alleged dirty bombs have been set off across downtown Los Angeles. He sees significant quantities of smoke mounting from the city center. His instantaneous judgment is for his wife and her wellbeing so he drives in the direction of the city center to find her. While it is a small-budgeted dramatic film more than anything it may seem to have pretensions about being, Right at Your Door shows several real matters Homeland Security planners are under immense pressure to handle like the interference with telecommunication because of so many calls, or the worried well who assemble to hospitals and emergency shelters and overpower emergency services, a great deal about the threat of contaminated people coming into hospitals and the necessity for facilities in which to work on decontamination. There are troubles through risk communication to the general public, the dilemma of enforcing containment after a biological attack, and the potential benefit of the Postal Service to circulate medications. It is resourceful to weave these predicaments into a dramatic narrative, a fundamentally theatrical one at that, one that is dialogue-driven more than anything. However this standard LA-based twist-dependent thriller also uses many erroneous facets like, frankly, the use of the term "dirty bomb," or a biological agent used as an additive in a bomb, and Homeland Security recommending for people to seal a single room sooner than the entire home. Even though this paranoid thriller maintains as a vital element to the story that a virus can develop and become more lethal just by being confined, a virus needs the infection of a living thing to reproduce. Right At Your Door taps into the present feeling of apprehension brought about by worldwide terrorism, with a fable of an attack on downtown LA that causes a haze of toxic dust overcoming adjacent suburbs, where many people generally feel the safest. Concentrating on a married couple mired in the catastrophe, Chris Gorak's script aims to squeeze frantic drama from a somewhat clever and unquestionably thorny circumstance which perceives Cochrane securely sealed inside his house as instructed by people in charge, when his infected and now possibly lethal wife McCormack arrives insisting to be allowed to enter. Such a strong dramatic conflict needs dialogue, acting, and plotting that are just as strong all the time to make it. Alas, as the exactly ninety-minute-long film advances and the conflict grows determined upon the catch-22 challenging the fate of the two petrified leads, an excess of humdrum scenes of inert dialogue and some especially half-baked moments that put a strain on suspension of disbelief in the end lead the movie to fail to sustain its tautness.

I'm not a film buff of any sort but after seeing 'Right at Your Door' I feel the need to say some things about it. Even though this film deals with a very real threat and demonstrates people under panic moving with pure instinct, as a piece of film, as the story winds on, the viewer finds themselves questioning how much longer the film will go on. In no way am I attempting to belittle the plight that chemical warfare presents. What I am commenting on however is how Gorak seems to drag out the film to make the conclusion all the more effective, and instead of causing surprise as a twist should all the ending does is leave the viewer thinking, 'Is that it?' With bombs being so recently detonated in London and other cities around the world I can see why this film has been made; in order in investigate whether people are ready for such an event, or whether mass panic is an eventuality that cannot be avoided. But as a piece of cinema, 'Right At Your Door' begins to sag as the story is stretched out more and more leading to a very strange twist that in all honesty it could have been better without. I'm not saying that the story didn't work or that I wasn't shocked by the demonstration of how an event such as this could play out. What I am saying is that the story becomes lost in the search for a conclusion, for some semblance of an ending. It could have been a lot better if attention had been focused on the story and the characters rather than a bizarre twist that you end up waiting for, in the hope that the film can regain the energy that it has gradually lost since it began. A promising thriller that swallows itself up.

The premise of this 'movie' is right enough, for a thriller. I'm not usually drawn to movies about mass suffering. But I miss California, and I thought this might be a bit of nostalgia for American voices and locales. AND a raucous ride, like the corny, but entertaining, Tommy Lee Jones movie of several years ago, 'Volcano' (or something). What I did not expect, and was horrified to find, was that this was an appallingly crappy movie. The script was stilted and blunt--- not in the terse, suspense-building manner of a great thriller, but rather in the film-school drivel-style of a 20 year-old film student who dreams of someday being a director. I do notice, on the IMDb title board for this 'movie' that the director, Somebody Gorak, has never directed a movie before. Although he has been in various production roles for several movies, a few of them good ones. Maybe he spent those years watching real directors work, and thought to himself: 'Hey, how hard can it be? I can do this!' Sorry, mate. In 'Right at Your Door', anyway, you clearly CANNOT do it. And maybe that's 'yet', but I dunno.... This 'movie' is awful from the first scene--- the required 'easy day in the loving life of...' the principle characters. You know, showing the unsuspecting hero and/or heroine waking up, pouring coffee, brushing their teeth, exchanging innocent banalities about the upcoming day, etc. These scenes are designed to create sympathy for the characters, and draw us in and set us up to be shocked and concerned for the characters when the terror, violence, tragedy, whatever is coming, finally arrives. Not so, here. The gargles, lip-smacking, beard rubbing mumbles of the awakening hero were more annoying than audience-bonding. The hero and his lady did not look like a couple, and nothing in that first scene made me believe them, or care about them. The radio and TV news alerts that came quickly after were equally unconvincing. Having lived through such real-life news flashes as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy (I was watching, as a kid, live coverage of his California hotel speech, subsequent entourage movement through the kitchens, and shooting), Anwar Sadat, both Space Shuttle disasters, Princess Diana, two volcanoes, a hurricane where I was living, and of course 9/11, and then 7/7. I felt that the movie's news announcers were phony. Completely unrealistic. The cops were fake. the citizenry panicking and fleeing and freaking out was also fake feeling. The film looked like some newbie wannabe film director had no money, so he shot it on cheap-o 16 mm, and blew it up to 35 mm for the theatrical release. It was dim, murky, and rather than captivating and enchanting, the way a real movie is supposed to be, had the claustrophobic effect of making the audience feel boxed in, and suffocated. I had a pal who was in a couple of first-time directors' indie flicks. They were showcased at LA area film festivals, and may have even gone to cable--- I can't remember. But they were awful movies, too. Bless them all--- they really, really tried, and maybe as a first effort they were expected to flop? Maybe those amateurs involved have since learned their trade and have moved on to bigger and better things. Dunno. But 'Right at Your Door' felt just like those embarrassingly bad efforts my pal participated in (FYI, as you might guess, he didn't get paid for his efforts. His appearances were to be a form of audition reel for him, to be his launching pad for better movie roles and ultimate stardom. Never happened, but hey, at least he showed up, right?). I summary, this is a really, really, horribly made movie. Premise and whatever else aside, it is unwatchable. I left before the end, and felt depressed as I slunk away from the cinema, as if the time I did spend there was way, WAY too long. Avoid this like the plague!!! I gave it a well-deserved 1 out of 10.