Dina Meyer (Starship Troopers) is Diana Purlow, a psychologist working with a new piece of equipment that allows patients who are hooked up to it to relive their memories and is able to capture a representation of said memories in the form of digital video. She's of the belief that this will be able to help free the wrongly convicted inmates in New Mexico, a state that practices the death penalty. She tries to use her hardware to free a man wrongly convicted of murder but because of the uncooperative warden (Dennis Hopper of Blue Velvet) and a governor who has a veiled past with Purlow, she's unable to get a stay of execution granted and he is put to death.

Enter Jesse Mowatt (Pavan Grover, who also wrote the film), a horrific serial killer who has the innate ability to get into people's heads and has a tendency to pray on victims that have some serious skeletons in their closets. Recently imprisoned at the facility where Purlow is stationed, she figures that he's the ultimate test subject to prove the worth of her theories, and despite the warnings of her co-worker, Pitchford (Lance Henriksen of Aliens), decides to start questioning Mowatt about his past and about his killing spree.

Purlow, through her conversations with Mowatt, learns more about his case than she may have initially wanted to know. When the time of Mowatt's execution draws night, strange things start happening within the confines of the prison and Purlow finds out that there's a lot more to this convict than she first thought.

Unspeakable is competently directed by Thomas J. Wright (who's not done much in the film world but has directed some great television such as The X-Files and Millennium). The movie has a nice, dark and sinister look to it that suites the story very well and captures the bleakness and hopelessness of the prison compound where most of the story takes place. The film also features pretty good performances by all of the cast members of significance, with Hopper going over the top to the point of bordering on self parody and Henriksen playing it cool like those who know his work expect him to.

So with those factors working in its favor and topped off with a couple of well executed moments of intense gore and a couple of nice scares, it's unfortunate that the script isn't on par with the rest of the film. The movie tries to go in a few different directions at once and because of that it feels more than a little disjointed. There are also a couple of moments where the dialogue seems a little unnatural and I personally found the ending a little predictable.

That being said, Unspeakable gets more right than it does wrong. It's an entertaining movie that moves along at a pretty brisk pace. It's never boring even when we do know what's going to happen and you could certainly do a lot worse for an evening's entertainment.

Video:

MGM's 1.85.1 ananmorphic widescreen transfer does justice to the dark color scheme that the film uses by relaying deep and stable black levels and consistent grays and browns throughout. There is some slight shimmering that is noticeable in a couple of scenes as well as some very mild but natural looking grain, but thankfully edge enhancement and compression artifacts are almost never present. Skin tones look natural and life like and color reproduction is distinct and never over saturated.