Descendant (2003)

 There’s something broken deep inside ‘Descendant’ that I’m still not entirely sure I’ve identified.  It has such a fundamental lack of understanding of the mechanics of storytelling that I’ve become far more invested in working it out than it’s worth.  I know what kind of movie this is trying to be, I know the purpose of it in a commercial sense.  The people who made it were very much aware of the exact market niche they were trying to fill but I’ve yet to work out exactly how what’s on the screen was mistaken for a functional movie.

Let’s back up a step and identify the principals involved.  ‘Descendant’ is a direct-to-video movie released in 2003 during that hazy overlap period of time when DVDs were clearly set to be the future but the VHS rental market still dominated.  Netflix was founded in 1997 but by 2003 had only 1.4 million subscribers.  They wouldn’t start offering streaming until 2007.  At the time of release Blockbuster had around 5,500 retail locations, ten years later they were down to 500.  While 16:9 televisions did exist and a few television shows had begun to at least film in that aspect ratio (“The X-Files” started in 1997, “Scrubs” waited until 2009) it’s not as surprising as it seems that this, an R-rated ostensibly erotic thriller, was filmed and released in 4:3.

It was produced by Del Mar Productions, one of only two movies it made.  The name comes from the husband and wife team of Del Tenny, who co-directed this movie, and Margot Hartman, who starred as Margaret Usher.  She shared co-writing credit with Kermit Christman, the other half of the directing pair, along with William Katt (of ‘Greatest American Hero’ fame), who featured as Dr. Tom Murray.  This exact same team had previously worked together on ‘Clean and Narrow,’ a 2000 movie directed by and starring Katt.  In between the two, and minus Katt, was ‘Do You Wanna Know a Secret?’, written and produced by Tenny and Christman for Two Left Shoe Productions and which also featured Hartman.  This was one of those shameless derivatives of ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ that’s vaguely notable for starring former teen heartthrobs Joey Lawrence and Jeff Conway. 

The only person involved in ‘Descendant’ with any kind of long-term consistent history in the business was Katt, who’s consistently worked as an actor but was a writer for exactly three things in his long career, the two Del Mar productions and a 1997 movie called ‘Blade Boxer’ that I would very much like to get my hands on, especially since although Jack Beeman is credited as its co-writer I am very sure that’s a pen name for Kermit Christman.  Tenney produced some Z-grade movies in the 60’s while Hartman had some small parts around the same time, the two having presumably met on the set of 1963’s ‘Violent Midnight,’ the IMDB plot description of which reads as “A war veteran from a wealthy but troubled New England family is suspected in a series of brutal murders in his small town.”  Spoiler: the killer ends up being Margot Hartman.

Unsurprisingly there is not a lot of information available on the actual nuts and bolts of Del Mar Productions but looking at the pieces assembled it seems an awful lot like a husband and wife producer team, long out of the business, met up with Katt and Christman and decided to get back in the game.  They turned out a couple of movies, sold a screenplay around the same time, then dropped the entire thing when this movie took them nowhere.  Except for Katt, who continues to have a career as a character actor, this was the last production that any of them were ever involved with.  The company itself has long since been dissolved.  Wikipedia claims ‘Descendant’ had a budget of $650,000, or just over a million in 2022 dollars, which by anyone’s standard is a pretty low budget.  Currently not streaming anywhere remotely legitimate it can be purchased at the time of writing on Ebay for $6.99+shipping with a free bonus movie, the 2006 thriller ‘Roman,’ featuring Kristen Bell.  Again Tubi has failed me.

These stills are out of order but please keep in mind they're all from while they're dating.

In retrospect the most notable thing about this movie is its purported star Katherine Heigl, fresh off of “Roswell” and a mere two years from “Grey’s Anatomy.”  Although she’s certainly the co-lead the actual protagonist of the movie, in terms of who the movie is about and who has the most screen time, is played by Jeremy London, right in the middle of a two-year stint as Chandler Hampton on “7th Heaven.”  Everyone else in the cast were various shades of working actors, the kind of bit-part players that speak a couple of lines to the lead actors in a long-running series or are part of the shifting ensemble of a daytime soap. 

It's at this point that I would normally do a rough summary of the premise of the movie but here we run into our first problem.  I’ve watched this movie several times, took 9,846 words of notes, I projected it on a wall and furiously drank cups and cups of tea while shouting at it, but I’m not precisely sure what the premise of this movie is.  I know the elements it contains, I know the genre it inhabits, I know exactly what works of Edgar Allen Poe it’s badly referencing, I can even explain the things that occur and the order in which they happen to make up the plot, but I’m still not sure why, exactly, any of this happens.  I don’t know what this movie thinks it does.

The best I can explain is that it’s like the people who made this had seen movies, had even been in movies, had been involved in making movies before, but they didn’t understand how a movie works.  They were aware it needed to be around an hour and a half long, have a beginning, middle, and an end, needed to be set in a location and take place over a period of time, have characters in it who say words and do things, and decided that if it had all of those things then what they ended up with must have been a movie.  Things happen in this movie because the people who made it were vaguely aware of the kinds of things that were supposed to happen in the kind of movie they were trying to make so the characters just did those things without ever bothering to work out why they were being done. 

Still dating.

Another problem with unraveling this movie is that it slowly reveals information and plot points over the course of the runtime in such a way that, if you’re not paying attention, might seem to make a kind of sense but if you actually lay it all end to end it doesn’t hold together at all.  In a nutshell, nonsense and all, from what I’ve pieced together, here’s what happens.  Please note this is not how it’s presented in the movie, this is a chronological list of events:

In 1839 Edgar Allen Poe publishes “The Fall of the House of Usher.”  Instead of a melancholy short fictional story this is a true story about a real-life brother and sister with the surname Usher who had an incestuous affair which produced a son.  Upon the publication of the story the brother buries his sister alive and sets the titular house of Usher on fire, killing them both.  You’ll note this is closer to the Corman-directed movie version than the original.  The already fully grown son, seeking revenge, then kills Emily Hedgerow, the cousin of Poe’s wife, by cutting out her heart.  Seven generations later a man named Ethan Usher, a bestselling author of two previous novels under the name Ethan Poe and falsely claiming to be Edgar’s descendant, is intent on revenge against the Poe lineage at the urging of his mother Margaret Usher.  He is introduced writing bad prose then sleeps with a sex worker and kills her offscreen by cutting out her heart for reasons that are never explained.  He also has frequent visits from the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe.  We then establish the existence of Anne Hedgerow, descendant of Emily.  She has a younger brother who it is heavily implied used to sexually assault her.  Ethan Usher has travelled to the small town in which Ann lives for a book signing, which Ann attends.  She introduces herself to him as a fellow descendant of Poe.  Later in the parking lot he fights off her drunken brother.  At this point the movie decides they are now in love.  The body of the sex worker is discovered and aside from giving the local deputy a reason to be around in various scenes this never impacts the movie again.  Much of the rest of the movie is simply Ethan Usher arguing with the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe while acting increasingly erratic and Ann Hedgerow being more or less fine with this.  Ethan conspires with his mother in stubbornly vague terms about the form their revenge is going to take.  The mother at one point says he needs to marry Ann, have her change her name to Usher, and publish another bestseller.  Ethan chooses instead to kidnap her best friend, kill her doctor, and then get killed by Ann.  The last shot of the movie is Ann in bed, pregnant with Ethan’s child, smiling at the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe.

I’ve left out various flourishes, such as Ethan’s insistence on turning the Hedgerow family home into a B&B, the local deputy being just as stalkery and obsessed with Ann as the murderer, Ethan disinterring Ann’s dead mother and leaving it in the woods for Ann to stumble across, the abusive brother being attacked and left for dead yet being fine after several days of apparent outside exposure only to be instantly killed when he reemerges, and Katherine Heigl failing to hide just how desperately uncomfortable the entire production is making her.

Stiiiiiill dating.

It's important to emphasize how little of the plot makes sense, even on its own terms.  Let’s leave aside the fact that none of the above information is established or communicated at all clearly.  This movie presupposes a world in which the fictional short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which is a vaguely scary story that’s basically a sketch about mental illness with some light touches of gothic imagery, is instead a true story of an actual family, the publication of which forever taints their name, so much so that over 160 years later the family, stubbornly sticking to the Usher name, finally decides to have their revenge.  The only problem is that Edgar Allen Poe famously didn’t have any children, so instead they focus their ire on a descendant of his wife’s cousin.  I refuse to believe that if they’re going after that tenuous of a relation there aren’t around two hundred other people just as closely related.  This person they’ve chosen to focus on also has a younger brother, yet oddly enough none of the revenge efforts seem to involve him. 

Then there’s the nature of the revenge.  It’s never made clear or explicit in any way to the audience what actual form this revenge is supposed to take but if I squint hard enough I think I’ve worked most of it out.  Having established himself under the name Ethan Poe he has published two horror books, at least one of which is a bestseller, and is struggling to finish a third that’s acceptable to his publisher.  His mother wants him to woo the apparently last Poe descendant, marry her, and then claim his rightful last name of Usher, whereupon he will publish his third book as a bestseller under his real name.  And that’s it.  This is as much of the revenge plot as we’re told.  How having her fall in love with him under a false name will accomplish any of this is left unclear, or how any of this will act as a form of revenge.  It all goes wrong anyways as Ethan Usher has an unrelated mental illness and just ends up as a very unsuccessful serial killer.

In a very real sense the spine of the story is broken.  There is insufficient reason for revenge and the revenge itself makes no sense.  This is why I struggle so much with the basic premise of the movie, there is no engine driving any of the actions.  I don’t know why any of the characters are doing what they’re doing, what they hope to accomplish, and none of the answers supplied by the movie make any sense.  None of this is helped by the way the movie doles out information.  It fails in two respects: the mechanics of revealing information and the pace and amount of it being given to the audience.  The first is a failure of moviemaking, the second is a failure of storytelling. 

The moviemaking failures are obvious and straightforward.  For example: the opening scene of the movie is Frederick Usher murdering Emily Hedgerow in 1839.  It wasn’t until I read someone’s negative online review that I realized that the characters were played by the leads Jeremy London and Katherine Heigl, mirroring their characters in the present.  This is because London plays Usher with a dense wig, a prop mustache, and an unintelligible accent while the editing and framing is so incompetent that we never get a clear look at Heigl’s face.  It’s essentially a very poor man’s version of 1991’s ‘Dead Again.’

They're so cute together.

Another example is an embroidered handkerchief Heigl is shown staring at several times over the course of the first hour before late in the film handing it to Usher with the line “I forgot to give this back to you.”  This remained inexplicable until my third viewing when I finally realized that near the beginning of the movie, when Usher and Ann meet in the present at a bar and Usher blots a wine stain on Ann’s blouse, he does so with this handkerchief, which is never shot in any way as establishing it as anything but a bar napkin.  When Anne contemplates it’s shown to be embroidered with a clear letter “E” and another letter which, no matter how hard I stare at it, seems to be a backwards “J.”  What this is trying to convey to the audience I am utterly unable to ascertain.  Until I went back and checked I had read it as an “E” and an “H” for Elizabeth Hedgerow, but if so I’d have no clue how it would fall into the hands of an Usher and what reason he’d have for giving it to her but luckily that’s not what it is and at no point does it make Ann suspicious or in any way factor into the plot so it’s completely pointless. 

Usher is shown writing several times over the course of the movie and while better filmmakers than these have also failed at making writing seem interesting that doesn’t make it any less obnoxious.  He speaks aloud as he types, bugs his eyes, he even smokes an ornate pipe at one point.  The prose the character turns out is terrible faux-Poe.  This is directly from Usher’s laptop screen:

 

“We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called.  They are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism.  A certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic opinion and the wizard wheels.  The silver cord was not forever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken.’

 

Because these scenes are inserted more or less randomly in between the others it took multiple viewings before I realized that the movie is attempting to tell us that he’s working on the book that will become a bestseller in order to fulfill his revenge as it’s only after he types ‘The End’ that he finally moves to kill Ann.  It’s never given more emphasis than a background activity and since it’s never really established what the revenge plan actually is the fact that this is an important part of it goes completely unnoticed on first or even second viewing.

The failure in storytelling is more egregious.  This is trying to be an erotic thriller and failing hard on both counts.  There are two shots of breasts in this movie and one of them is on a corpse, so the erotic part seems to consist of the bare minimum content to get an ‘R’ rating so it could sit next to the other videos in that section of Blockbuster.  Any eroticism that might come from the interactions of the characters is immediately snuffed out both by the fact that not only is one of the leads blatantly the killer but he’s also played by London as twitchy and more than a little sleazy.  This is not helped by lines such as the one twenty-two minutes in that had me rewind the scene multiple times to make sure I heard correctly.  While strolling through what is eventually established as her large front yard Ann is explaining to Usher, after just meeting him the night before, that her mother had recently died.  The following conversation takes place:

Before the line.

               Usher: Did you love your mother?

              Ann: Loved her.  And relied on her.  I’m twenty-four, but still a kid.

              Usher: (leaning close, husky-voiced) But not a virgin.

After the line.

 It should be noted that after a pause Ann changes the subject to his next book and they almost kiss one scene later.  This is pretty representative of all of the dialogue in the movie.  Usher will say something either creepy or random or both that’s usually sexual in nature and then they make out. 

This movie is bad enough that it manages to violate Ebert’s Law of Conservation of Characters in a rather ingenious way by not having any suspects other than the obviously guilty party.  During my first watch I kept getting thrown by the movie not even attempting to establish a red herring.  Before I realized he was part of the production behind the movie I assumed that the presence of William Katt meant he must be the murderer since he was a character actor I recognized.  When he didn’t get enough screen time I started suspecting Ann’s childhood friend, the local deputy, who’s established as blatantly stalking her before I realized that the movie was somehow treating this as romantic.  These suspicions weren’t based on any actions of the characters or the way the movie was framing them, I just assumed that if the protagonist of the movie is introduced in the same scene as a character who is later found horribly murdered that the killer isn’t simply going to be that protagonist because that would be a very stupid thing to do.

In addition to removing all suspense from the movie this has the secondary effect of the audience eventually hating Ann.  As it becomes more and more obvious to us that Usher is very clearly the killer we become more and more annoyed that she’s not picking up on the all of clues and insane behavior.  This isn’t helped by the fact that Usher and Ann have three short scenes together before they’re falling into bed, planning to open a B&B, and she’s thinking about having kids.  This relationship is established as a fact without ever showing any sort of basis for it other than authorial fiat.  The entire movie takes place over the course of a week and if they’re in a scene together they’re either having sex or she’s vaguely uncomfortable because he’s acting strange.  So not only do we start yelling at the screen asking why she’s still with him we have no idea why she got with him in the first place because the relationship itself is never portrayed.  Since we don’t empathize with her we don’t care as the danger escalates because we don’t care if she dies and the more she doesn’t notice the less we give a shit.  She is literally drugged, locked in her bedroom, then chased through the woods to stumble across the corpse of her dead mother before she understands she’s in actual danger. 

The topper of the lack of storytelling ability is a fact that I didn’t realize until about the third time throug.  None of the survivors at the end of the movie ever understand what Usher was doing.  Everything Usher says to Ann after he’s chased and captured her are lines from the book he’s written and at no point does he tell her that his real last name is Usher and that he’s seeking revenge.  After the events of the movie all anyone knows is that Ann met someone who claimed to be a distant relative who was creepy around her for about a week then went crazy and killed a couple of people before dying.

Every loving couple has arguments.

The clumsy Poe references shoved in throughout are also failures, but at least the intent there is understandable.  An unexpected benefit of watching this movie was pausing to read the various Poe works they referenced for the first time since high school.  It turns out that Poe was a pretty good writer.  Naturally the movie has ravens, eventually Usher starts calling Ann Lenore, a character gets bricked up alive behind a wall, and someone is tied to a coffee table while someone swings a pickaxe at them in a pendulum-like manner.  None of these are done with any kind of style.  The ravens are either just random shots of the birds used as scene transitions or they’re just heard randomly in the background.  Usher calls Ann Lenore as a reference to the lost love in the poem even though he’s not in love with her.  Usher bricks up her friend in the basement but doesn’t quite finish and although Ann sees that he’s built a random brick wall in her basement she never bothers to check it out.  The pickaxe as pendulum thing is such a casualty of the budget that I really wish they hadn’t bothered. 

Some of them are just random verbatim Poe quotes tossed into the script almost at random.  The movie opens with a line from the poem ‘The Conqueror Worm’ that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.  Usher drops a Poe quote in front of a character and claims it as his own only for the character to call him on it, which approaches clever except for the fact that they mangle the quote and miss the point of it as well.  The only one that’s overt enough to become actually funny is at the very end, when Ann shoots Usher and yells “Nevermore!” for absolutely no reason except because Poe.

The fact that the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe is hanging around is utterly inexplicable.  It’s heavily implied throughout that it’s just a hallucination of Usher but the movie ends with him being seen by a pregnant Ann so no, movie, you have a ghost Poe in you.  The first few times he shows up Usher reacts as if startled or alarmed, then suddenly in one scene he talks back to him, is annoyed he’s always showing up, and from that point on he’s just a random nuisance to our killer.  Sometimes he’s a silent observer, sometimes he mocks Usher’s writing, sometimes he expresses concerns for his mental health and urges him to get help, and finally he quotes himself to a dying Usher before just walking off.  He serves no function in the plot and doesn’t affect anything that happens, which would be the point if he were a ghost, and he provides no insight into Usher’s character, motives or actions, which would be the point if he were a hallucination. 

There’s so much else I could complain about.  The deputy coming to a dramatic realization after reading Usher’s book but the movie never bothering to explain what that revelation is.  The doctor, upon hearing that Ethan has a prescription for Clozapine, getting down what’s obviously a dictionary and reading that’s it’s used as a treatment “for inconsistent and dangerous behavior” rather than, y’know, schizophrenia.  The deputy grimly wiping his gun with a rag while staring at a newspaper article about Ann’s dead mother for no discernable reason. 

#relationshipgoals

 

Every piece this movie is built of is broken.  It’s already asking a lot for the audience to buy that a story they probably never read was actually based on real events that aren’t fully explained until an hour into the movie.  Then you introduce a character that’s so obviously the killer that’s it’s actually distracting.  Mix that with a romance that’s never established and makes so little sense that you start hating everyone on screen.  Top it off with a revenge plot where it’s never established what the revenge is or why it’s being sought and then end the entire thing with the survivor heavily pregnant by her serial-killer ex-boyfriend and smiling at the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe.

It’s an erotic thriller that’s not sexy or suspenseful and I’m not in the least surprised that Del Mar Productions folded pretty much immediately after this was produced and all but one of them never worked again.  The acting is bad, the dialogue is atrocious, the directing is basic, the art direction is non-existent, there are about three actual sets and the rest are random outdoor shots, but all of these are pretty minor complaints when the fundamentals are so deeply flawed.  Nothing about this movie is interesting except for maybe the presence of Katherine Heigl and I’m completely certain that other than the four principals involved in the making of this movie I’ve given it more thought than any other person in existence.  The only reason I’ve spent this long wrestling with it is that it’s broken all the way to the bottom in a way that I haven’t often seen.  Even with the worst of movies you can usually figure out what they intended to make before reality got in the way.  This was made by people who didn’t know what they wanted to say and had no idea how to say it.