Testing Sam (aka. Rule of Three, To Love, Honor, and Betray) is your usual no-budget, bottom feeding Hollywood fare destined for a video store/cable premiere near you. It is extremely unimaginative, like the screenwriter/director opened up the cliché lexicon and flipped to that chapter on "Romantic Love Triangles". There are absolutely no unexpended twists and turns, carbon copy characters, and overall it is just cheap, hampered by a bad script, bad directing, and no budget, leading to lackluster locations and bad photography. Even the "hit song" is outdated, sounding like a bad Kim Carnes number from the early 80's. Its little wonder that the film was made in 1996 and has probably been sitting on a shelf until now.

As far as the poor actors saddled with the task of trying to make this interesting- there is Douglas Weston as Roger. Weston looks like some sort of Lyle Lovett/Noah Taylor (from Shine) clone with a Tim Burton hairdo, and is pretty unimpressive. Luckily, William Forsythe (Raising Arizona, American Me) plays Mitch. Forsythe being on of the great b-film actors of our time, and no stranger to the direct to video, pay cable premiere genre, he throws himself into every role he's in, no matter what the dreck is, and at least gives you a good scene or two even though he's stuck playing a rough around the edges, bouncer/artist in a bad romantic triangle movie... And then we get to Audie England as Sam. Audie England is sort of a Zalman King (Red Shoe Diaries) protégé, and I admittedly have had a fascination with her. You couldn't really own Showtime in the mid 90's without running across her in something, and despite my having no love for the soft core genre, she has a look and a presence that I've always liked. At the very least, she is more intriguing than the vapid, cillicone enhanced, blank-eyed, peroxide-haired women that robotically remove their clothes in movies made for people too afraid to rent/buy porno. Here, she tires to break out of that mold, and well, she's no Liv Ullmann. She still seems to be just a novice, and unfortunately, in Testing Sam there isn't good material to work with, much less a chance to sizzle, which seems to be her chosen career niche.

The DVD : TVA International. Well, they don't have much to work with, and TVA doesn't tweek an already badly filmed film and make it any better in their transfer... At 22:29 the DVD pixellated and completely froze on both of my players. I had to skip ahead to the next chapter and back track to see the scene, which continues to digitally stutter for a few seconds. Picture- Fullscreen. Like I said they didn't have much to work with. Even a good cinematographer can make a bad day look better, but every scene in the film is dirty and very lackluster in color. The lighting is awful, take the one love brief scene which is lit by a sole lamp in the background, leaving the actors so in the dark it could be two big, fat toothless hillbilly's for all we know. Sound- 2.0 Dolby Digital Mono. Have I mentioned this was a cheap movie? Well, I have to do it again, There apparently wasn't a budget for looping and re-dubbing, and they must have had only one boom mike because there are many scenes that were badly recorded, with the actors too far away from the recording devices, or with horrible background noise obscuring the dialogue. Extras- 12 Chapters--- Trailer.