The Pining – Review

After a number of members of the same therapy group turn up dead in a series of bizarre circumstances, a no-nonsense police detective (Jackie Dallas) is forced to re-open the investigation. This, in practice, mostly means harassing the group’s leader, the possibly-sinister, possibly-merely-odd Father William (Tom Sizemore).

Sizemore, a reliably gritty presence, once had a solid career playing sweaty tough guys in tough, sweaty pictures like Natural Born Killers, Heat, Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down before drug abuse and revelations about his unsavoury personal life doomed him to spend two decades appearing in no-budget genre offerings – with a sideline in tabloid reality telly. Here he turns in a fine performance, selling some pretty hokey dialogue and making us believe in his character’s inner conflict, beyond the fairly unexceptional “troubled priest” rôle he’s given. But the real star here is Jackie Dallas, whose detective character is so delightfully unhinged – grabbing a handful of a death-row inmate’s last meal, then spitting it out and questioning his culinary taste – that she turns what was presumably supposed to be a serious horror mystery into a trashy comedy. She seems to have had a blast making the film.

One only wishes the scenes without her animating presence were as enjoyable. After a quite interesting first act, with a unique set-up about trying to take care of a solitary zombie, the picture never offers us anything particularly special, although it’s often bad in ways more unique than the problems that tend to affect low-budget, amateurish productions.