He Sees You When You're Sleeping (2002)

Call me a glutton for punishment, but I usually watch Mary Higgins Clark's stories turned into films, even though they're generally schlockily produced, slow as molasses, badly acted and accompanied by Psycho music. I can't believe I'm writing this, but I'd almost rather see Grosso-Jacobsen, who normally produce movies from her books, than Lifetime.The film stars Cameron Bancroft, one of the worst actors I've ever seen, as Sterling Brooks, a self-absorbed stock broker who is killed by a traveling golf ball (probably to stop him from yelling all his lines at the top of his lungs) and goes to the other side (cue the dry ice). There he meets Joe, played by another great thespian, Greg Evigan, trying but failing to speak with some sort of British accent who is supposed to help him qualify for heaven since right now, his fate hasn't been decided.Joe and Sterling return to earth and Sterling learns that he has to help his old girlfriend Annie (Erika Eleniak) and her daughter (Nickol Tschenscher). Annie overheard mobsters talking and planning to set fire to a house and follow it up with a murder, and her evidence is critical in a case against them. She has been under protection and separated from her daughter, who is miserable. Joe wants Sterling to make sure they're reunited, and with the girl's father, for Christmas.Eleniak owns this type of film, so she knows how to handle herself. In this production, she plays a singer who does jazzed up versions of Christmas songs. I'm not talking about jazzing up Jolly Old St. Nick, she's jazzing up hymns like Silent Night.This story has similarities to Ghost and It's a Wonderful Life, and Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark can write good stories that don't make for heavy reading. "He Sees You When You're Sleeping" could have been a lovely Christmas story and a real tear-jerker, but for me, the acting wrecked it. I say spend a little extra money and get another one or two good actors and throw in a good director. You might be surprised at the results.

"This could happen"?!? In what universe would that be? If Heaven can really wait, why doesn't it? do just that, and spare us all these cloying, wishful thinking movies about the so-called "afterlife." "It's A Wonderful Life" at least had Frank Capra's and James Stewart's extraordinary talents to recommend it. This piece of treacle has only Mr. Mediocre, Greg Evigan, and Erika Elenia, whose relentless Bullockian cuteness can go only so far And It would have been a perfectly serviceable story without all of the "Ghost Whisperer" blather but that kind of thing, apparently, is exactly what all those teenage girls demand and they and their lame, puerile little taste are exercising some kind of spiritless pastel tyranny over the popular culture. The movie also contains more than a few unhappy echoes of "Ghost," the painfully silly beginning of the era of "the-only-good-man-is-a-dead-man movies

This clunker didn't know if it wanted to be a comedy or a drama. I sat through all of it but knew where it was leading all the way. The book was probably better, which makes me wonder why I spent 2 hours on this cornball "chiller". I've seen worse, but wish I'd bypassed it.

It's one thing to put a movie on TV. Another to shoot one and put it directly on TV. Another to shoot a movie as if you never intended to do anything with it other than put it on TV. And man does this one smell of video!The story's okay, with some adaptations from the novel, but that's no big deal. I can forgive that. I can even forgive the sappiness of the stoy; judge a movie on its own genre.What I can't forgive is the production. I admit that PAX is no big media centre, but surely they can still draw a little better talent than the casting for this flick. The leads all look like they're doing a commercial for local TV or else hamming it up in a civic theatre. People sometimes seem to forget that when there's a camera involved, they don't need to act out as they might on stage.What's worse is the cinematography which is framed like a daytime drama, and lit with less creativity than that. The staging is simple -- two people talking should face each other in the middle of the room. The action should be center-stage. Et cetera.You can bear with it, but the production doesn't do half justice to what the authors of the novel deserve...