Movie Review: Doonby
by Bill Sardi
Recently by Bill Sardi: What Are The Elites Holding Over Us?
Directed By: Peter Mackenzie
Produced By: Mike Mackenzie, Peter Mackenzie, Mark Joseph, Tommy G. Warren, Dawn Krantz, Antonio Quintos
Starring: John Schneider, Jenn Gotzon, Robert Davi, Jennifer O'Neill, Joe Estevez, Will Wallace and Ernie Hudson
Most of us look forward to a night at the movies to enjoy a comedy, a thriller, or even an on-screen romance. But would we be enticed to go to a movie that had a serious meaning to it?
The tag line to the movie I’m talking about is: “Every story’s worth telling. Every life’s worth living.”
Hmm, sounds a little heavy for a night at the movies. But the meaning of the movie is held right up until its tearful end. So its meaning doesn’t get in the way of an action movie that will grip your insides. It jumps from one action scene to another as movie goers are left to ask just what the connection is between each spine-tingling scene. As much as you want to figure out the meaning of this movie, it won't let you discover it till its emotional end.
There’s a shoot ’em up robbery at a bar, and a just-in-the-moment of time plucking of a baby from the path of an oncoming truck, and a rescue of a damsel in distress from a knife-wielding stalker, thrown in with a doctor who is falsely accused of rape. And then there is a budding but immature romance that is woven from beginning to end.
Well then, you ask, is it a guy flick or a gal flick? Not telling.
To understand the movie, entitled Doonby, you have to understand its lead character,
Sam Doonby, played by John Schneider of Dukes of Hazard fame.
You will join the entire cast of the movie in trying to figure out just who Sam Doonby is.
They all want to know too. "Where'd you come from Doonby?" asks the town's sheriff. He says a small town in Louisiana, where his girlfriend and her mother travel to find out what they can about this mystery man named Sam.
You get to see flashbacks in his life, which gives you a growing hint at his roots, his true identity. Yet every tidbit of information is never enough to let you know what you need to know about Sam.
This guy Doonby turns a sleepy Texas town into a whirlwind of events which somehow throw him into the center of each one.
And as the movie unfolds you are going to ask yourself, why is this saintly guy Doonby falling in love with the town’s floozy? But then again, why is angelic Sam working as a bar tender in Smithville, Texas?
And why doesn’t Sam Doonby become, just for a moment, a little bit human and succumb to the seductions of his lusty drink-mixing bar maid whom Sam discovers naked in his bed?
Sam Doonby has this mysterious diary which we never get a peek at, and with every event in the movie, he jots down another chapter. Laura, his spoiled girlfriend, played by Jenn Gotzon, whom he says he fell in love with the moment he spied her from a bus driving down the highway in her convertible sports car, is dying to get a look at that diary. At the movie's very end, she finally snatches Sam's diary. You'll want to be there when Laura opens its cover and examines its pages.
