I have to admit, I'm a sucker for this genre. Body Heat, Red Rock West, U-Turn...that's my kinda jam. Unfortunately, Harris Done can't compare to Kasdan, Dahl, and Ridley, respectively.

Vincent Ventresca plays Thomas "Doc" Reed, a former doctor fresh out of prison for a DUI accident that killed his wife. He drifts into a town called Purgatory Flats and gets a job as a bartender. Alexandra Holden plays Sunny, a local nymphet who catches Doc's eye. Kevin Alejandro plays Owen, Sunny's drug-addled husband. Brian Austin Green plays Randy, Owen's dipshit brother.

Gregg Henry rounds out the leading roles as Owen and Randy's uncle Dean. He's a violent asshole, much like Randy and Owen, not to mention many of the other characters Henry was wont to play around the turn of the century. He had an especially scuzzy turn in Payback with Mel Gibson.

Owen drags Sunny to a deal with a dope man played by Nicholas Turturro. The deal goes wrong, naturally. An extra gets killed, Owen gets shot in the stomach, and Sunny gets shot in the arm. Doc happens upon the scene and takes them back to the house they're sharing with Randy.

While Doc gets the bullet out of Owen, the rest of the family yells at each other. Randy blames Sunny for Owen's misfortune, claiming he never got into trouble like this before he married her. A strange thing to say, given Owen was already a two-time felon.

Doc tends to Sunny's injury next. He applies a bandage that is clearly too small to cover her bullet wound, but for some reason the wound isn't visible beneath it. Maybe it's a magic bandage. That would explain why it sometimes changes shape or disappears between shots.

Doc clearly has a crush on Sunny. Their chemistry feels obligatory. Holden plays Sunny with natural allure, but not the kind of portentous sultriness I've come to expect from a femme fatale. Think Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction. Sunny seems more like a sorority girl who thinks a handy for a dime bag is a fair trade. Promiscuous and maybe a little morally ambivalent, but not dangerous. Of course, the script makes her turn a lot more dangerous than she seems.

Owen spends most of the movie unconscious, but when Doc and Sunny finally have sex, he wakes up just in time to catch them. Doc knocks him out with sedatives to buy some time while they figure out what to do next.

The plot twists come fast and furious in the second half. It turns out Sunny done ran through Owen's entire clan. She dated Randy first, and she's currently banging Dean on the sly in exchange for smack. (That dime bag observation turned out to be prophetic.) Randy tracks down Owen's dealer for payback. The dealer tells him that Sunny had orchestrated their meeting as an ambush to kill Owen. Meanwhile, Doc tries to convince Sunny to leave town with him. Sunny thinks they should kill Owen first so he won't tell Randy and Dean about their infidelity. Not that anyone in the family is likely to faint at the news that she cheats on her husband.

Owen eventually wakes up again while he's alone with Doc, but dies abruptly when he slips and impales himself on a broken table leg. Doc tries to hide the cause of death with a bedsheet. To nobody's surprise but his, it doesn't work. The rest of the cast gathers around the body for the inevitable violent showdown.

Purgatory Flats isn't the worst movie I've ever seen—it's not even the worst movie I've seen today—but it's not good, either. When it's not clumsy, it's derivative. I can't recommend it unless you're super stoked to see Alexandra Holden in her underwear. Try any of the other movies I mentioned in this review instead.

5 out of 10.

Seen on Freevee.