“Gerald is not coming back,” Miranda reassures Lucian, “because I think he might be dead. Besides, what’s Gerald going to do? Poetry his victims to death? Gerald may be bigger than Lucian, but “Backgammon” never presents him as a credible threat, so there’s no terror factor. What doesn’t make sense is the notion that Gerald sticks around, stalking the house and doing things like altering the paintings in an attempt to scare Lucian. So it makes perfect sense when she kicks him out. Gerald drinks constantly, and is abusive to Miranda. As luck would have it, Lucian wins all these paintings in Gerald’s poker game. Gerald also paints lousy portraits of Miranda naked, which Lucian stares at with, you guessed it, his mouth hanging open. Gerald’s modus operandi is to get a rise out of whomever he’s around, a feat accomplished either by quoting the French poet Baudelaire or spouting off insults that are so piss-poor they wouldn’t win third prize in a Don Rickles imitation contest held by fifth graders. Gerald is so obnoxious that he forces me to use the dreaded word “pretentious” to describe him. And the “mystery” subplot is kicked into motion by a poker game initiated by Miranda’s soon-to-be-ex, Gerald ( Alex Beh). Games-not mind games- actual games play a major part in "Backgammon," because who doesn’t want a little Monopoly to go with their sex? The “thriller” part of the film climaxes with a backgammon game. Doesn’t this guy have Tinder?īut I digress. Sure, he’d like to sleep with Miranda, but Jesus, she is not the only fish in the sea. His character is written as the dumbest man on Earth, a guy who stays around hoping to get lucky even after his lust object starts cutting herself and demanding “let’s play Backgammon, hee-hee-hee!” Every time Lucian tries to escape, the script finds a way to keep him around for no credible reason. He too walks around with his mouth open, a blank stare on his face that’s supposed to represent, I don’t know, confusion? Horniness? Fear? He looks the same in every situation. Had her character been revealed to be an alien from a distant planet who got all her ideas about the human female from 12-year old boys, it would have been a more convincing plot twist than anything “Backgammon” offers the viewer. Allen slinks around the entire film with her mouth slightly agape like the Gerber baby, scrunching up her face and giggling at every opportunity.
Since Miranda is supposed to be the kind of seductress Sybil Danning, Shannon Tweed or Sylvia Kristel would have played had “Backgammon” been made 30 years ago, Allen is forced to exude what director Francisco Orvañanos erroneously thinks is sexiness. It’s so annoying that you want to mute the soundtrack. Allen, who gives one of the worst performances I have ever seen in a film, applies this tic to the increasingly dreadful dialogue (credited to three writers) she is forced to utter. Not since John Travolta’s Terl in “ Battlefield Earth” have I been presented with a character who punctuates damn near every sentence with a goofy laugh. “If Elizabeth truly loves you, she’ll come back and see it was all a mistake! Hee-hee-hee!” “It’s good for you, hee-hee-hee!” replies Miranda, holding an admittedly delicious-looking sammy in her hands. “Have a bacon sandwich, hee-hee-hee!” says Miranda.
The aforementioned sexual tension is supposed to be between childhood friends Miranda and Lucien, but the actors have zero chemistry and the banal dialogue does them no favors. Miranda ( Brittany Allen) tries to cheer up Lucian ( Noah Silver) after his girlfriend Elizabeth ( Olivia Crocicchia) has stormed away from the cabin they’ve been holed up in all weekend. Something is off from the first scene, which involves bacon sandwiches and allusions to one character’s girlfriend seeing something that looked sexual but was not.
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