Lovers, Liars, And Lunatics – Review

3rd April 2012

It’s refreshing, I suppose, to be able to write a review of a film about which you have very little to say. When watching Lovers, Lies, and Lunatics, the second film written, directed, edited and produced by Amber Benson (the lesbian lover of Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer that had an unfortunately fatal disagreement with a bullet), it was honestly infeasible for me to work out whether this was simply an abysmal mess of cinema, or just sort of passably forgettable.

This ‘quirky comedy’ involves a dysfunctional family being taken hostage by a pair of inept burglars who have been hired by the husband’s mistress to steal his money. Justine (Amber Benson) and Louis (Michael Muhney), the pair of criminals, are so shockingly amateur that they are caught out from the start when they decide to have (loud) sex on the kitchen floor and from there fumble at every turn, whether it’s using aprons to tie their kidnappees to chairs or removing their masks to reveal their faces. Comedic value is also meant to be added by the incongruous bickering between all the family members who seem to forget that they’re held hostage and descend into a tiresome family diatribe whenever possible.

Sub-par acting make the, already ludicrous, characters seem like they have verbal diarrhoea as they over share, spewing reams of superfluous dialogue at any given point. However, as the movie moves from one calamity to the next, as the robbery completely falls apart, Lovers, Liars, and Lunatics does have from darkly comic moments, indeed it’s so absurd that at some points it borders on hilarious, but it’s the kind of hilarious that you’ll either enjoy or simply switch off as trash. The saving grace of the film might be Christine Estabrook’s performance as Elaine, the wife, as she struggles with an unfulfilling marriage, her husbands infidelity, the bizarre hostage situation, and the general lunacy that surrounds her.

Farcical, with a lackadaisical air of nonsense, Lovers, Liars, and Lunatics is pushed on by Amber Benson, the little engine that could (but probably shouldn’t have). Just as the truly ridiculous dialogue flowed between characters, I similarly drifted between boredom, amusement and sheer bafflement that eventually gave way to ambivalence. I might have enjoyed it, I might have hated it, ultimately I’d have a hard time trying to ascribe any response to it with feeling.

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