Twisted and Taking Lives

Reviewed by EWAN McDONALD

(Herald ratings - Twisted *, Taking Lives * *)

Two videos that we've bundled together because both feature actresses who've clearly spent too much time with their personal trainers when they could have been working out their scripts and pumping their characters.

Twisted stars Ashley Judd as Jessica Shepard, a San Francisco detective whose hobby is to go to bars, pick up guys and have rough sex with them. In Hollywood this is considered progress because that is what most male movie detectives have done for the past 50 years.

Shepard and her partner, Mike Delmarco (Andy Garcia), are sent to investigate a body found in the bay. She recognises the dead man because he is one of her acquaintances, which is surprising because she's not usually in a state to remember them.

She tells the police commissioner (Samuel L. Jackson) but he is a nice man who raised Shepard as if she were his kid after her father went nuts and killed several people, including her mother. So he keeps her on the case.

Then another body turns up and, yep, she had been friendly with him, too. And a third. By now Shepard is drinking a lot and blacking out. Could she be killing the men and not know it?

In Taking Lives Angelina Jolie plays an FBI profiler who has to find a serial killer who has been disposing of young men and stealing their identities in Montreal (which is outside the FBI's jurisdiction but a neat plot device will allow her to work there, and the production company to make use of cheaper facilities in Canada).

Seems our man has been in the murder game for 15 years, but Illeana Scott (Jolie), with offsiders Leclair (Tcheky Karyo) and Paquette (Olivier Martinez), will get to the bottom of the mystery.

She will use psychology, like lying in a victim's grave to find out how he was murdered. She will outwit strange folk like Jorge Costa (Ethan Hawke), a shadowy art dealer, murder witness and possibly the killer. Or the next victim. Or maybe (Hart) Kiefer Sutherland could be ...

At least The Day After Tomorrow is fun as it borrows from those earlier disaster flicks. Here, Jolie, director DJ Caruso and the crew rob the graves of far better movies like Silence Of The Lambs and Hannibal. You can still rent them instead.

Twisted - DVD, video rental now

Taking Lives - DVD, video rental 13 October