Synopsis: In order to get her husband back, an architect’s psycho ex-wife kills everybody she can get her hands on.
Stars: Yancy Butler, Nick Mancuso, Suzy Amis, Babs Chula, Claire Riley, Hamish Tildesley, Barry W. Levy, Roger Barnes, Tom Pickett
Director: Mark L. Lester
Rated: R
Running Length: 87 minutes
Disc Review in Brief: Larry Cohen’s script and Yancy Butler’s crazed performance elevate this DTV psycho-thriller above its station, and Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray finally gives it the presentation it deserved all along.
Review:
Some movies escape direct-to-video purgatory and reveal hidden depths. The Ex is not one of them. Written by Larry Cohen and directed by Mark L. Lester (Class of 1984, Commando), this psycho-sexual thriller arrived during the DTV boom of the mid-90s with credentials that promised something smarter. Based on a novel by John Lutz, who also wrote Single White Female, it has a pedigree suggesting craftiness. What it actually delivers is cheap, cheesy, and at times unintentionally hilarious.
David Kenyon (Nick Mancuso) has built the perfect life: successful architecture career, beautiful wife Molly (Suzy Amis, Titanic), adorable son. What he’s hidden from everyone is his first marriage to Deidre (Yancy Butler, Initiation), a truly disturbed woman he divorced years ago. Now she’s tracked him down. And if Deidre can’t have David, nobody will.
Butler attacks this role with the bunny boiling intensity of someone who believes she’s making Fatal Attraction. She’s not. Every line reading lands as a dramatic proclamation, every glance loaded with menace she clearly intends as terrifying. The result plays closer to camp than thriller. By the midpoint, it becomes genuinely difficult to believe any character wouldn’t notice how completely unhinged Deidre is. She’s operating at maximum crazy from her first scene, leaving nowhere to escalate. Butler commits fully, which I appreciate, but the commitment only highlights how miscalibrated the performance is against the material.
Amis, by contrast, registers as almost comically passive. She’s the endangered wife who never seems to sense danger, even when she’s sitting in a Jacuzzi with the woman who has been terrorizing her family unbeknownst to her. There’s also something amusing about watching two women destroy their lives over Mancuso, who carries himself less like a romantic ideal and more like someone’s divorced uncle. That ordinariness might work in a smarter film that is speaking to someone truly obsessed with love. Here it just adds to the overall strangeness.
Lester directs with the same over-the-top energy he brought to Class of 1984, but without the self-awareness that made that film fun. Cohen’s script has moments of cleverness and nasty cattiness buried under the cheese. Occasionally you glimpse the wicked thriller this could have been, like when Butler interacts with her hopless therapist (played by the extraordinarly named Babs Chula). Those glimpses fade quickly. Compared to a genuine nail-biting sizzler like Single White Female, The Ex lacks any real impact. It’s not undiscovered—it’s just not very good.
Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray is actually better than the film deserves. The new HD master—personally approved by Lester—unveils a level of visual craft that old VHS transfers never captured. Shot on 35mm, the film’s cinematography finally shines, even if its soft lighting reflects the era’s aesthetic. The restoration is crisp and clean, and fresh interviews with Butler and Mancuso add color: Butler dives into her character work, while Mancuso recalls the technical hurdles of staging intimate moments.
Stacked against the flood of erotic and psychological thrillers from the same period, The Ex brims with ambition but never quite sticks the landing. Recommended only for die-hard fans of the cast—and even then, make sure it’s your flavor of guilty pleasure before diving in.
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