It’s said that we all have to pay the piper sometime. That proves especially true for Elizabeth Hurley, as she takes a job in the infamous Hamelin, Germany, of Pied Piper fame. Now, you might think that this Pied Piper business is strictly mediæval, but that just goes to show what you know. While her high schooler daughter is out of the house most of the time, Liz Hurley mostly drinks wine and drowns in guilt over some vague incident in her past. Unfortunately for her, the Pied Piper hasn’t gone away at all, and has a particular animus towards parents with dark secrets. Also, it probably doesn’t help that she does so little to look out for her high schooler daughter (Mia Jenkins), who doesn’t seem to be spending much time in school, because she’s always busy having secret liaisons with a handsome, though much older, Roma feller (Jack Stewart). How much older is he? Old enough to grow a fetching goatee, anyway. It’s mostly likely all legal under Germany’s eccentric age-of-consent laws, but it remains a somewhat unsettling relationship, despite the evident chemistry between the two talented actors.
And that’s pretty much it, through most of the runtime. From time to time we get some vaguely spooky shots of a skinny, raincoat-clad Piper, which seem to have taken inspiration from the Raincoat Killer of niche videogame Deadly Premonition, but mostly it’s teen-on-adult romance and parental drinking, with the odd bit of nonsense about gypsy magic interspersed throughout. Horror fans are best served looking elsewhere, while die-hard fans of the Pied Piper story, if they exist, will be much better served by the Terry Pratchett adaptation The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents.
With lines like “Uh, ma’am, this is not a church. We fight crime.” and exchanges like “How hard is ‘not easy’?” “So far – impossible.”, The Piper is often unintentionally funny – sadly, though, scenes like the climactic rock-off don’t occur frequently enough for The Piper to reach “so bad it’s good” status. It does, however, feature a scene of Liz Hurley whipping herself, and surely that has to count for something.