• Produced, written, and directed by Mike Cohen
• Starring
  • Robert Lewis Stephenson
  • Joanna Sims
  • Ashley Chase
  • Eric Podnar
  • Elizabeth Carlson

O, the irony. Paradise Hills is a small town in New Mexico, “not too far” from Albequerque (as one character puts it), and there are no hills. Do you think that maybe the “paradise” part might be overselling it? Do you?

Our story begins when a family moves from California to Paradise Hills where Dad has a new job, and I’ve rarely seen a collection of actors who reminded me so much of other actors. Father Nate (Robert Lewis Stephenson) bears a passing resemblance to Peter Coyote; his much-younger wife Emma (Joanna Sims) looks like a very tired Denise Richards; barely-eighteen daughter Amber (Ashley Chase) reminds one of a poutier Christina Ricci; and son Dax (Eric Podnar) is… okay, he just looks like a bad haircut with a teenager underneath. But three out of four ain’t bad.

Leasing Contract: War & Peace.

And when I say that Amber is “pouty,” I don’t mean in that cutesy little-girl way that leaves me cold but drives some men wild. She’s upset about the move to Paradise Hills and life in general, so she’s in full WHINEMOANBITCHSNARLWHYME mode with afterburners. I have to believe, because sanity demands it, that all screenwriters who use the unlivable teenage girl character in their story have not in fact encountered one off the screen; if they had, the movies in which they appear would be interrupted at the two-minute mark by the Thundering Fist of Deity, which smashes the whiner into the ground and allows all of the other characters to go on with their lives.

Anyway. We meet them as they drive into town on Sunday to their new condo, to be met by Katrina (Elizabeth Carlson), the real estate agent. She greets them with all smiles and professional warmth, but she also has a leasing agreement the size of a movie script (in fact, it may BE the movie script), which unfortunately she needs signed that day or she can’t let them have the place. So against their better judgment, Nate and Emma (and Amber, because she’s eighteen) sign it unread.

“Yes, I’m busy. It’s the Emperor’s New Workspace.”

As they unpack and settle in, their complicated backstory begins to emerge. Emma is Nate’s second wife, and used to be his secretary; his first wife died and, after he married Emma, he had been charged with her murder. For the last year, Nate has been in jail during his trial while Emma and the kids lived nearby in Van Nuys; before the trial reached a conclusion, though, the police found compelling evidence pointing to someone else and the charges were dropped. So now Nate has accepted this out-of-town executive job offer to get away from the notoriety of their old stomping grounds and give the family a chance to heal.

But this isn’t the town to do it. In quick order, they find that Nate’s boss Jack lives in the next apartment, though Jack is himself out of town; his wife Debra (Rebecca Klingler) confides to Emma that Jack knows what Nate is going though — Jack was accused of the murder of their daughter. Their teenage son Scott (Evan Lee Dahl, who’s got sort of a Bobby Jacoby thing going on, or maybe a young Harvey Keitel) is a horndogger who pushes Dax to set him up with Amber; he also thinks that his dad really did kill his sister. Nate arrives at the office to find that almost all personnel are off dealing with an emergency in the Santa Fe office, leaving him alone with his beautiful secretary Karla (Tasha Tae, who resembles Bond girl Talisa Soto, right down to the underwhelming acting). Emma has trouble with the cable in the apartment, and makes the acquaintance of the hunky cable repairman (Mark Gant, who’s got a Christian Slater smirk around the eyes).

“Schoolbus? Nah, everyone here just kind of tumbleweeds in.”

Everyone seems to be in just the right position to push their buttons. Amber’s new friend Danica (Persephone Apostolou) tricks Amber into what appears to be a compromising lesbian tryst just as Dax enters her bedroom at Scott’s urging. Frequent and convenient cable outages keep the hunky repairman showing up right after Emma and Nate have tense words. Debra turns on the TV just to show Emma news reports about “accused murderer” Nate moving in to Paradise Hills. Dax’s old girlfriend Katie (Elizabeth Blanco), with whom he’s trying to maintain a distance relationship, mentions having heard something about Paradise Hills on the “reality TV channel” before their connection is abruptly cut off. Danica comes over to the apartment when Nate is there alone, ostensibly to retrieve a necklace, then throws herself at Nate. Nate and Emma start becoming unsure of each other’s fidelity; Amber thinks Dax has been spreading rumors about her and Danica at school; and the kids both start to wonder if their dad is as innocent of their mom’s murder as they always thought, thanks to Scott’s parade of suspicions about his own father and his motives for hiring Nate.

Now, I have something to admit: I have withheld information from you, information which viewers gain in the first ten minutes. The family is the subject of a reality TV series, unbeknownst to them. (Gee, if they had only read that voluminous contract!) Nate’s job, their neighbors and school friends, all of it is part of the engineered backdrop to the series, designed to make them turn on each other and get themselves into compromising positions on the hidden cameras spread all through the apartment. Katrina isn’t a real estate agent, she’s the producer (and her professionally artificial demeanor isn’t her “real estate face,” it’s the way she acts).

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re chilly. This is New Mexico!”

I tell you this because having the audience know this while the family is still in the dark is something that I’m not sure works well. In the mystery genre, there are two basic types of story structure. In an “closed mystery,” the audience discovers the clues as the detective character does, and part of the appeal is the audience attempt to figure out the solution before the detective does (think Murder She Wrote). In an “open mystery,” the audience knows from the beginning who did what and how, and the appeal is seeing how the detective unravels what should be a perfect crime (think Columbo). I bring this up because while Paradise Hills is some sort of puzzle story, it isn’t a mystery; the characters don’t know there’s anything to be solved until well into Act Three. What would be entertaining in an open mystery as a battle of wits between the perpetrator and the detective becomes in this case a feature-length time lag as we wait for the protagonists to catch up to what we already know — and even then, they don’t figure anything out on their own; another character whose only purpose in the movie is as a deus ex machina drops a DVD of incriminating footage into Amber’s and Dax’s laps ten minutes from the end. And no, I don’t need to put spoiler warnings up around anything; not only does the DVD case proclaim that this unsuspecting family of four has been roped into a reality show without their knowledge, but the trailer manages to give away the entire plot in under two minutes.

Knowing as we do from the beginning that it’s a reality show gives us ample time to consider just how unlikely it all is, especially for a show that’s apparently on a public cable channel (as opposed to being distributed furtively to jaded enthusiasts like a snuff film). For one thing, it turns out that Katrina’s people planted evidence to get Nate off the hook for murder and this other suspect on, evidence which doesn’t seem like it’s going to stand up to intense scrutiny. You mean that these producers were willing to commit a major felony just to set up this TV program? The Idiot’s Guide to Contract Law should let Katrina know that there’s no way the contract would survive court scrutiny with three adults to testify that she explicitly gave them no time to read the contract and instead insisted it be signed unseen. Dax is established as a minor, which is why he’s not invited to sign the contract; then the producers go to great lengths to maneuver him into compromising positions on camera. On top of the felony charges for planting evidence, Katrina would be looking at kiddie porn charges, even if that footage was never broadcasted. And then after the criminal courts are done with her and the civil courts have rendered the unread contract null and void, Nate and Emma could sue her and her performers for alienation of affection (New Mexico is one of the eight states that still recognizes it as a tort action).

The cable repairman, preparing to lay some cable.

In other words, this movie can’t work in anything we’d recognize as the “real world.” Maybe against a science fictional setting, or in a fictitious country in which privacy laws are vastly different, perhaps it could work. But as it is, disbelief is simply too hard to suspend, and gets heavier by the minute. It’s not a great waste of a movie, but it falls into the trap of making the viewer think, but being unable to deal with what the viewer must then conclude.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 3
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0