Ethan Poe (Jeremy London), a descendant to Edgar Allan Poe who like his old relative also is a horror writer, goes to the small town of Tennison to attend a seminar. There he meets Ann Hedgerow (Katherine Heigl) and they are both attracted to each other. Ann invites Ethan to stay at her big mansion and for him to finish his book that he's currently working on there. Later on the police finds a dead prostitute and the evidence at the crime scenes leads to Ethan but without really proving anything concrete. Deputy John Burns, a personal friend of Ann's, becomes more and more suspicious of Ethan and start to investige the young writer and what his real reasons are for staying in the town.
To be honest, I can't help but feeling a little bit sorry for this movie. It's obvious what they wanted to do here, unfortunately the end result doesn't come out very good.
The first 30 minutes or so are really good and interesting. The acting by Jeremy London (Party of Five) and Katherine Heigl (Roswell) is great and they give a really good performance which leads you to think that this movie's gonna deliver something. But after a while you notice that it isn't going anywhere, it's going somewhere but not the right way.
A thriller like Descendant should have a good build-up and maybe some cool twist in the end, accompanied with some tension. But the actual end just seems like they just wanted to finish the movie or were just to lazy to come up with something a tiny bit clever. This is all a shame since the movie starts out kinda promising but after a while it just goes down-hill and never recovers.
This thriller has a lot of gothic horror elements to it and if you're a fan of Poe himself, it might be more interesting to watch as there are a few Poe references in the movie throughout.
Another thing is that this movie was made in 2003 but looks like it was made in like 1995 or something. It would've been different if they wanted it to look old, but that's not the case here. It kinda looks like your typical 90's tv-thriller, and Descendant kinda has that tv-thriller feeling going for it as well.
I can't recommend it, but they should be given some credit for what they've tried to do here. Too bad it didn't work out.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE: Descendent, Descendent
MOVIE YEAR: 2003
DIRECTOR: Kermit Christman, Del Tenney
WRITING CREDITS: Kermit Christman, Margot Hartman
GENRE: Thriller
CAST: Jeremy London, Katherine Heigl, Nick Stabile
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 86 min
RATING: 3/10
Descendant Website/IMDB Click here
Descendant Trailer Click here
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