It seems like every week I read about, receive in the mail, or enter a theater to view a movie that I’d never heard of. Running Scared (with Vera Farmiga), The Dark (with Maria Bello), Edison Force (with Justin Timberlake), and Bandidas are just three such recent examples. Now comes Unknown, which shouldn’t be unknown because it has an all-star cast that includes Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear, Joe Pantoliano, Barry Pepper, Jeremy Sisto, Peter Stormare, Chris Mulkey, and Bridget Moynahan, plus several recognizable faces from TV.

Apparently never released to the theaters, Unknown now comes to us as a Weinstein Company – IFC co-release on DVD. One can instantly see why the Weinstein Company might have been drawn to it. The film begins with a quasi-Tarantino-esque congregation of guys’ guys coming to in a warehouse somewhere. One is handcuffed to a railing (Sisto), another is tied to a chair (Pantoliano), and the other three are lying on the concrete floor. Caviezel is the first one to wake up, to the ringing of a telephone. He answers but because he has no memory of who he is or why he is in the warehouse he fakes it. Soon the others start to arise and they engage in long, rambling, repetitious conversations about who they are and how they got there. A rather clever premise is almost instantly pissed away with bad dialogue.The pissing is compounded by almost immediate cuts to the outside world where a woman (Moynahan) is trying to appease both some men who have kidnapped her wealthy husband and the FBI agents trying to “help” her. Thus we begin to learn a bit more about the background of these men through these cutaways.

Still, the film remains eminently watchable thanks to the great if wasted cast. But few such like clever movies can live up to their premises, and inevitably the more we know or begin to piece the puzzle together the electricity is zapped out of the project, and it may well be that there was no other way to bring us up to date on the overall plot without the mystery-quashing cutaways. Directed by Simon Brand and written by Matthew Waynee, for both of whom this is a first feature, there are warehouse bathroom scenes to evoke Reservoir Dogs and the presence of Joe Pantoliano to remind us of Memento and other films soleil. The surprises, turnabouts, and reversals continue on up to the film’s last minute, and I have to say that I was puzzled by its final revelation (DON’T READ THIS: Does Caviezel’s character turn himself in at the film’s last seconds, or is he doing something else that is inexplicable to me, something that might be telling us “this movie’s plot will carry on beyond its tangible climax,” like Sorcerer?).

Unknown arrives on DVD on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007, for a mere $19.95. It comes in a fine wide screen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) and for extras contains about six minutes of deleted or extended scenes, most having to do with the secondary characters.

Bridget Moynahan is also in Prey, released the same day by the same company, and in this one she has to anchor the movie, unlike ** Unknown, in which she is window dressing.

Prey takes place in African veldt, where a drought has caused dire changes in the feeding habits of lions. Newman (Peter Weller) is an engineer in charge of the new damn. He’s arrived with his second wife Amy (Moynahan), and two kids from his first marriage the resentful and sulky Jessica (Carly Schroeder) and David (Conner Dowds). While Newman is off to survey the damn, Amy and the kids head out for the tour of the land. When David has to take a pee, their guide walks him off to some bare trees, whereupon the guide (carrying the car keys) is attacked and killed by a lion. The three survivors spend the next three days and nights trapped in the Range Rover as a pride of lions hovers outside.

We know when the lions are there because the film slips into “leonine vision” that is a desaturated and distorted version of the same shots we just saw. A cross between Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and Jaws, this is a film in which human beings can outrun lions, and where ** deus ex machine characters, such as a hunter and his son, are handy when the scripters (Beau Bauman and Jeff Wadlow) have penned themselves into a corner. Director Darrell Roodt (Cry, the Beloved Country) tries to make this essentially static film “active” with a camera that swirls all around its characters, but that ends up just a distraction. The plot also requires that someone drive recklessly at the worst possible moment and to drop precious water when startled. Prey requires that Moynahan (who resembles Famke Jannsen) look haggard and dehydrated but even that can’t quell her inherent beauty, even under the relentless close ups of the movie’s tight quarters (one notices that she has a mole on her lower left lip). The other cast members do the job expected of them. The film ends with a nice family pose by the four survivors with Newman saying, just after the viewer does, “Let’s go home.” Moynahan is about the only reason to watch the film.

Like Unknown, Prey comes out on January 30 for $19.95, in a nice widescreen transfer (2.35:1) and with no extras.

Also out the same day from the same people for the same price also in (2.35:1) and with no extras, is The Gathering, a horror film set on the Isle of Man. Directed by Brian Gilbert (Wilde) and originally released in 2002, The Gathering is written by Anthony Horowitz, which makes this, after Stormbreaker, makes this the second lousy Horowitz film in a season. This saddens me because his show Foyle’s War, is one of the best things on TV.

Unlike Stormbreaker, The Gathering isn’t atrocious, just rather predictable and derivative. It evokes memories of Friedkin’s The Guardian, Don’t Look Now, and the tradition of British films about home invaders, of strangers invading the sanctity of the British home and refusing to leave, such as Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle.

The invader is Cassie (Christina Ricci), who materializes outside the town of Ashby Wake where she is instantly struck down by the car driven by Marion Kirkman (Kerry Fox). Since the girl is relatively unhurt, and she can’t remember much about her past, Marion takes her into the family estate, where there are already two children and a husband, Simon (Stephen Dillane) who restores religious and art artifacts. His latest project is a buried church nearby, whose dire statuary Cassie sees in the faces of the villagers at Ashby Wake.

As Simon and his colleagues learn more about the nature of the buried church, Cassie is alerted to the fact that something is wrong by the fact that people stare at her and dogs bark ominously and she has hallucinations in which normal people have gaping holes in their heads. As she wanders around the village in her copious free time, she meets and is aided by a helpful fellow stranger, Dan Blakeley (Ioan Gruffudd) who is house sitting another estate. We instantly know he is up to know good because he is too nice and helpful to be true, and this is otherwise the kind of movie in which cars on the highway blithely pass by where there is a (ridiculously contrived) car accident occurs, an accident that ends, by the way, in a variation of the new, more violent version of the old Val Lewton “bus” as seen in Final Destination and Meet Joe Black.

Meanwhile, to Anne Dudley’s sea-saw music, Cassie rescues the Kirkman son several times and also stops a bomb from taking out most of Ashby Wake. The central mysteries, which are who is Cassie and who are the strange figures she sees watching her, burble in the background to know real resolution as far as I can tell. Either that, or I just didn’t get it, as the villains seem to be a blend of some kind of tale about these evil watchers born of early Christian times who thrive throughout the bad scenes of history (one of them is watching the motorcade at the JFK assassination) and revengers for child abuse. To its credit, though, the film actually ends, rather than leaving things open ended for a sequel.

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