“Alarmed” Movie Review

 

“Alarmed”

Movie Review

 

The story of the movie "Alarmed" is as follows: When parents Janet and Sean depart for a much-needed weekend getaway, masked men bypass their sophisticated home security system to hold their teenage son hostage. Matthew Kohnen wrote and directed the film, which features Pooch Hall, Brittany Baker, Eric Allan Kramer, and Chris Whitcomb in the main lead roles. The couple obeys a series of cryptic directions after being threatened with losing their son, leading them to Janet's office with one last directive: to assassinate her boss.

Sean, portrayed by Pooch Hall, and Janet, represented by Brittany Baker, are having marital problems. It doesn't help that their son Billy, played by Chris Whitcomb, is back living with them full-time while serving a sentence under house arrest after being caught for hacking into various federal networks.

They make plans for a weekend getaway after determining that they need some alone alone. Given that Janet has recently been elevated to CEO of high-tech security system manufacturer Citadel Security, this may be their final chance for a while.

 

As they attempt to enter the house, a father and son unintentionally lock themselves out and trip the alarm. Running, riding a hoverboard with Billy, etc. You might mistakenly believe that the movie had been mislabeled if it weren't for a brief scene showing someone installing a tracker on Janet's car while she was at work.

Also, the clichéd characters are ineffective. Billy is the geeky hacker who can access Department of Defense computers but who is unsuccessful in attracting female attention. Sean is the former jock who married a family but is now unemployed and attempting to stay at home. More than his hacking activities, he is worried about the fact that his son is still a virgin. And Janet is a hard-working businesswoman who is juggling too much work while still attempting to keep it all together.

That changes when mom and dad utilize the surveillance system's app to witness trespassers Andrew, Coltrane, Martinez, and Foggy entering their home. Billy is attacked, and Kat, the female he invited over, is shot. Sean and Janet are instructed to kill Janet's employer Larry as their only remaining task.

Alarmed combines some well-executed and tense passages with really ridiculous ones that made me want to hurl something at the television. Janet and Sean ask two of their friends to break into the house and try to save Billy after being instructed not to call the police. How that plays out is obvious. Janet has a scanner for listening or tracking devices. She checks herself, Sean, and their phones, but not their car, which would be the most obvious location to hide one.

Even if Alarmed doesn't always maintain the level of intensity you might expect from a movie like this, thankfully the script does enough correct things to keep it fascinating. There are too many cliched story points and instances in the script where the focus is lost or the plot is advanced by fortuitous coincidences. The end result is a thin thriller that borders on Lifetime territory yet manages to keep us interested.

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