They were selling this one at the supermarket for $3.99, the same price as the six-roll package of toilet paper. I made the wrong choice, as usual. A gruesome film noir about a serial killer who hacks off pieces of his victims' bodies before killing them. Hard to tell what was going on because both the lighting and sound recording were so poor, but there was some connection to a psychotherapist and her group therapy patients. Needless to say, lots of people had to die before the killer is identified and caught. (Partial spoilers ahead.) Don't bother trying to guess whodunit, because it is impossible to tell until the last minute, when the missing information is abruptly supplied out of nowhere. There is an (unintentionally) hilarious sequence in which hero Chris Penn, who, let's face it, is built more like John Belushi than like Arnold Schwarzenegger, is shot in the chest, injected with a sedative and tied down in the ambulance taking him to the hospital -- but powered only by his obsessive hatred of the killer, he manages to break free from his restraints, overpowers the ambulance attendants, drives off at high speed, gets into a collision with two or three other vehicles, abandons the ambulance and runs to the location where he believes the killer is located, all based only on one of those infallible "hunches" law enforcement officers always have in these films. Yes, he manages to thwart the killer's attempt to kill the final victim, who then remarks that "we need to get you to a hospital." The toilet paper I could have bought would not only have been more useful than this film, but it likely would have had superior narrative and cinematic qualities. Live and learn.
Review of Papertrail
