SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

ThrillMessage There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

christopher-underwood I felt this could have been so much better and began to temporarily tire of it somewhere around the halfway mark and then it lifted and ran pretty well to the end. David Hemmings seemed a bit limp and Gayle Hunnicutt almost asleep but then maybe it was the erratic script. I guess there is also the problem where a film is going to have different levels of reality that not all can be made too transparently clear. There is a wonderful cameo from Wilfred Hyde-White and things certainly pick up with the appearance of Daniel Massey and Arthur Lowe. Apart from the dialogue being rather lacklustre at times and some scenes going on a tad too long, the music is completely wrong. I have seen the score by Johnny Harris highly praised and possibly outside of the film the jazzy music is fine but here it is too loud, too obvious and basically, bloody annoying. Despite all this, the film remains likable enough and certainly worth a look.

sol ***SPOILERS*** Recovering drug addict and best selling British author Tim Brett,David Hennings,is to meet his Aunt Lucy Dawson,Flora Robson, after church services while visiting her on vacation in Pompeii Italy but someone got to her first. Found strangled to death outside the ancient ruins of the city the police can't find any reason for her murder other then it was the work of a escaped or as of yet uncommitted lunatic from a local mental institution! Back in Britin Tim makes it a point to find his aunt's murderer or murderers who in fact has been shadowing him all the way there form Italy!The first tip that Tim gets to the reason why his Aunt Lucy was murdered is when he's confronted by this strange woman, Mary Wimbush, at his apartment building asking him to drop out of the case. It seems that she's somehow involved in Aunt Lucy's murder in her knowing the real reasons behind it. It's later that Tim is allegedly accused by the woman of trying to assault her by London police Sgt. Matthews, Derek Newark, and is threatening to press charges against him! Things get even stranger for Tim as it's later found out that the woman in question, Mary Wimbush, was found strangled! That after she later told Tim that she want's his forgiveness in that what Sgt. Matthews told him about her was all BS! In fact it's later discovered that this Sgt. Matthwes is no cop at all but an impostor who's working with this shadowy group of ex-cons called the "Stepping Stones" who were in fact founded and supported by Tim's late Aunt Lucy!As Tim soon finds out Aunt Lucy was involved in getting high IQ and highly educated ex-convicts high profile jobs in the government and business world by getting them fake identities and hiding their criminal records through her "Stepping Stones" project! With many of these persons now in very high and prominent positions she was blackmailing them to keep her from exposing their past and thus destroying their very successful careers! It's when Aunt Lucy went a bit too far that they, the ex-cons, took matters into their own hands. As for Tim who's soon to marry Juliet Briston, Gayle Hunnicutt, the woman who in fact found the murdered Aunt Lucy his meddling in the case and making things a bit hot for them has the "Stpping Stones" planning to totally discredit if not murder him. That's by making it look like he's back to taking drugs which would make whatever he say about them totally unbelievable!***SPOILERS*** David Hennings holds the plot together even when it starts to get a bit confusing as ex-drug addict Tim Brett who begins to realize that he's way over his head in trying to find his Aunt Lucy's murderer. Despite her kind heart Aunt Lucy's concocted a sinister plan to get revenge against the very persons, ex-convicts, whom she's been helping all these years. This stems from the murder of her husband of just two months in a home invasion over 20 years ago! Tim in trying to find his Aunt Lucy's killer opened up a while new can of worms that not only put his and his fiancée Juliet life in danger but in a strange way, through Aunt Lucy blackmailing the ex-cons as well as covering up their criminal records, justified her own murder!

gridoon2018 For the most part, "Fragment Of Fear" is a gripping film. Although sometimes it can get too talky, it cleverly builds an atmosphere of justifiable paranoia, as we can see both why the hero feels so trapped and scared and why it is difficult for other people to believe his stories. But in the last 5 minutes or so, the film goes all vague and ambiguous on us, leaving us to interpret it all in our own way. The problem is that either way leaves too many unanswered questions. What does hold the film together is a committed central performance by David Hemmings; in what is largely an one-man-show, he creates a believable Everyman, a regular guy who gets in over his head. And an amusing credit for those who stick to the very end: "Colombus" is played by....a London pigeon. Who would have guessed? **1/2 out of 4.

chrisdfilm Richard Sarafian is a decidedly underrated director. After finally seeing this, it's satisfying to report his VANISHING POINT was not a flash-in-the-pan. FRAGMENT...does not move at the same pace, nor does it get the viewer involved quite as quickly, but once you're about twenty minutes in, you're hooked until the end as Sarafian and screenwriter Dehn continually manipulate reality and our perceptions of it, along with lead character David Hemmings' perceptions of it. Really brilliant in the way it portrays a matter-of-fact unfolding of events that seem like a conventional, yet still insidious conspired-murder-by-blackmail-ring plot. But then we're constantly shown by the dialogue and actions of other characters that these events we've just witnessed may never have occurred. As an audience, we're constantly being shifted back and forth, momentarily convinced that recovering-addict-turned-successful-writer Hemmings is undergoing paranoid delusions, then the next moment convinced there really is a vast conspiracy against him and his investigation into his rich aunt's death. Disturbing and constantly involving, sucking the viewer in until the shocking conclusion. Unfortunately, the film's one real liability, which may in fact be the reason for some viewers' antipathy toward this film, is its totally inappropriate music score. Not only is the score mixed too loud on the soundtrack, it repeatedly draws attention to itself, often diffusing the effects Sarafian is trying to achieve. If only they had gotten someone like John Dankworth who could have composed a similar jazzy score but much more subtly and in keeping with the film's rhythms. Of course, even better would have been Ennio Morricone, someone who had already scored many Italian giallo thrillers that had attempted to play with reality in a similar way. Whomever hired Johnny Harris made a big mistake. His score is the one thing that keeps this from being a genuine little masterpiece.