The Donor

Directed by Damian Lee, The Donor follows Jeff Wincott’s Billy Castle as he attempts to track down the person responsible for stealing his kidney during a weekend vacation. It’s a fairly promising setup that’s employed to persistently (and frustratingly) underwhelming effect by Lee, as the filmmaker, working from Neal H. Dobrofsky and Tippi Dobrofsky’s screenplay, delivers a perpetually incompetent thriller that’s been hard-wired with a whole host of inept, low-rent elements – including amateurish performances, laughably overwrought dialogue, and substandard visuals. (It doesn’t help, either, that Lee places an ongoing emphasis on Billy’s hopelessly unconvincing banter with Michelle Johnson’s mysterious physician.) The movie’s mostly unwatchable atmosphere is compounded by Lee’s decision to stress Billy’s hopelessly, infuriatingly tedious investigation into what happened to him, and it goes without saying, obviously, that the resolution is just about as anti-climactic as one might’ve anticipated – with the end result a seriously awful direct-to-video trainwreck that fares poorly even by the notoriously uneven standards of the genre.

1/2* out of ****