Sleeping With the Enemy (1991)
Directed by Joseph Ruben
Maybe not conventional horror, much like Firstborn that I covered earlier in the month, Sleeping With the Enemy is more of a thriller. With Gourley and Rust had me watching more “Yuppie Nightmare” movies than I have in the past so I figured it was a good time to talk about it.
The plot for this is, Julia Roberts plays a woman that fakes her death to escape her abusive psycho husband. He begins to piece together what happened, finds her and tries to kill her. The acting is pretty good, this is early Julia Roberts, think Pretty Woman era. She’s captivating and has that thick red flowing hair. Patrick Bergin plays the asshole husband and he’s menacing with his suits and mustache. This movie had a lot of build up, but kind of falls flat at the end. He hunts her down, goes into her house and waits for her. He attacks her and she ends up shooting him. I would’ve liked to see her run a couple more times, to build up more of an interesting ending. I think a movie like Enough with Jennifer Lopez handles this better, even though that movie has a lot of inadvertant comedic elements.
There isn’t much in the way of effects, not really any blood or much you would associate with typical horror. This movie relies heavily on the acting performance of Julia Roberts, which she does well. The nice guy Ben is ok, he isn’t much help at the end though with the fight, but he’s a good guy and likeable. The pacing was fairly good, it didn’t drag on at any moment and wasn’t too fast. I think if I’m going to watch a movie of this subgenre, I’m probably going to pick Fatal Attraction.
All in all it was a solid movie. Not anything great, but not bad at all. Julia Roberts was trending up quickly around this time and you can see why. I give this movie a solid B.
