This formless thriller serves no other purpose except to offer lingering, tormented close-ups of Catherine Mary Stewart as Annie Carver, a woman whose violent past threatens to change forever her highly respectable and peaceful present.
Carver is a Utah-based art dealer married to a successful architect (Scott Valentine) and leading a blissful life until Charlie Ingall (Dennis Farina) shows up. He is an sleazy investigator who knows Annie is really Natalie, a decade ago the runaway moll of New York gangster Lev Petrovitch
(Carsten Norgaard), who is still obsessed with getting her back. Ingall demands $100,000 to keep quiet but fatally hits his head while struggling with Annie.
Unfortunately, Lev has already been alerted and insists on reuniting with a reluctant but resigned Annie. Lev's unsentimental father, the "Russian godfather of Brooklyn," tries to end his son's distraction by sending hit men after Annie. Lev and the assassins conveniently gun each other down,
leaving Annie free at last.
OUT OF ANNIE'S PAST feels like a sequence of transitional scenes after the main sections were edited out; everything happens too fast, and the story races to its end. The only time director Stuart Cooper can muster some enthusiasm is in the campy portrayal of a trash-TV show that reenacts Annie's
past at hysteria pitch. With so much time spent by Annie on frantically liquidating her assets to pay off Ingall, she does not exactly strike one as a strong and resourceful protagonist. But she does look fetching in lingering, tormented close-ups. (Violence, sexual situations.) leave a comment
