The other week, I decided to pick up a number of cheap, used videos at the video store. There were a number of titles that sounded intriguing for a number of reasons, and since the videos were so cheap (4 bucks or less), I really had no problem buying them, even if they were to turn out to be junk.

This morning, I watched the first movie of the bunch, called Lena’s Holiday. It looked like a cute, low-budget romantic comedy. I had a feeling it would be a bit of a cheesy experience, but, hey, it’s something different from my usual fare! The movie was pretty mediocre, not very surprising, but, since I knew what to expect, was a tolerable time-waster.

Actually, the premise of Lena’s Holiday was another element that attracted me to this video. Lena is an East German woman who has just experienced the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and, as an exercise in her newfound freedom, decides to go on a trip to Los Angeles. Once she arrives, she finds out that things aren’t always what they seem. She experiences the reality of cabbies who rip you off. She also finds out that certain motels don’t believe in truth in advertising (her supposedly extravagant hotel turns out to be a dive for prostitutes to hang out -- a somewhat amusing moment), and she also runs into a famous photographer who has his head in the clouds, and who professes to love her and ask for her hand in marriage.

At this point, Lena discovers that her bag has been switched. We’ve already seen this at the beginning of the film, when a woman quickly exchanges bags before Lena steps into a cab. Clearly, Lena is about to be thrown into a possibly criminal situation.

Lena meets a cab driver (Chris Lemmon), and the two try to find out who owns the bag. They get an ID, and an address -- Lena goes to the house, and finds the woman --- dead. She’s terrified, and has to hide under the bed when she hears two men enter, and attempt to hide the body in a trunk. She manages to escape, and tries to convince the cab driver that there’s a body in the house.. but when the two enter, there is no body.

Lena and the cab driver soon become close afterwards. She has nowhere to stay, so the cab driver offers her to crash at his place for the duration of her trip. She gets to have a good time, sees some of the sights, and she even has a little fling with the cab driver. But the two killers are, unbeknownst to her, on her trail.......

Lena’s Holiday is the kind of movie that they don’t make anymore. This was made in 1990, when the low-budget B-movies were slowing dying off, and video companies such as Prism and Vestron were about to go under. Nowadays, the only thing that resembles a B-movie are Playboy softcores, or direct to video action or horror, and most other low-budget flicks are art-house pictures, but Lena’s Holiday is a low-budget B-movie romantic comedy/thriller, a knockoff of Hollywood product. This film has a bit of action, a bit of suspense, a bit of romance, some comedy, and some ribald humor, but is all quite innocuous and innocent, except for a few bad words, and the dead body, of course.

A good example of the meshing of styles comes when the criminal element comes to the fore. It’s a bit creepy when Lena hides underneath the bed and finds the dead body on the floor, and hears the two killers say that they need an ax to fix the body into the truck. And, later on, when the killers catch up to Lena, they appear very threatening. But (spoiler alert) turns to a pretty bizarre scene when one of them demands to know where the box of condoms, which contain smuggled diamonds, is. Lena says “Don’t understand word condoms!” The other killer has to sit Lena down and go through a linguistic laundry list of every possible slang term for “condoms” in hopes that she’ll actually know what the hell they’re talking about!! This scene was definitely the funniest of the film -- suddenly the threat has evaporated, and the silliness takes over, yet somehow I believe that something like this could definitely happen, if two killers really had to deal with someone without much proficiency in English.

Chris Lemmon gives a smug performance. He doesn’t exactly have the consistent energy of his dad, Jack. Sometimes I think Chris sounds rather bored, or grumpy, although a couple of times he does brighten up -- although most of those times involve fooling around with Lena (no surprise!!!).

Felicity Waterman, as Lena, is cute, but it’s hard to say how good she is, since she has to speak in a broken German accent. Her character is naive, the stereotypical naive foreigner who is not yet sophisticated enough to survive on her own in such a strange world. Her character is what attracted me to this video, since it sounded quite intriguing to have a (then) current situation like the fall of the Berlin wall, and East Germany’s introduction to freedom and the West, as a subject for a romantic thriller. In reality, though, while we get a few references to her former situation, her nationality is just a quirk. This is merely a fish-out-of-water story, of a naive girl out of her element in this strange town. She could have been a country girl from Kansas and the story would change little.

Overall, this film is an innocuous time waster. I didn’t mind it, just because it was amusing to see such a lightweight, innocent and bland romantic thriller, but you’d have to be a fan of predictable romances to really go for this.



Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good Date Movie