The Poker Club

Now available on DVD

Cast:



Johnathon Schaech as Aaron Tyler



Judy Reyes as Detective Patterson



Jana Kramer as Trudy



Johnny Messner as Bill

Directed by Tim McCann

Review:

Adapted from a novel by Ed Gorman, The Poker Club is surprisingly better than you would imagine. I am not a big fan of Jonathon (Prom Night) Schaech’s writing, after all he wrote the lousiest and most intensely retarded episode of Masters of Horror, “The Washingtonians.” But here he not only adapts the novel into a tight and intriguing movie with co-writer Richard Chizmar, but flaunts his acting chops.

The film gets off to a great start with a Casino Royale-style opening credits sequence. We meet our cast then, a bunch of old friends who have gotten together for the usual poker game and good-natured ribbing. One of them goes into the kitchen to get beers, and runs into a burglar that has broken into Schaech’s house, who plays Aaron. The friends band together to fight the frightened burglar and accidentally kill him.

Aaron is the good guy here and he wants to play by the rules (even though he is cheating on his wife), and call the police, sighting the fact that the man broke into the house and his death was an accident. His friends, however, urge him against it. They’re all afraid of ending up in jail, so the only option left to them is to get rid of the body and act as if nothing happened. This is your basic thriller set-up, sure, but it gets better.

They pile into Aaron’s truck with the dead burglar, and after a hairy run-in with a cop who pulls them over for speeding, they dump the body over a bridge and head to the strip club. Aaron returns to his normal life, trying to deal with his dissolving marriage, while receiving mysterious phone calls in the middle of the night. His mistress Trudy (played by the gorgeous Jana Kramer from Laid to Rest), shows up at his house the next night to get with him, but he turns her away and she storms out of the house. The police show up almost minutes later to inform him that she is dead. In fact, she was killed in her car just steps from his house. Someone slit her throat open from ear to ear.

His friend Neal, a coke-head, shows up the next morning and warns Aaron that someone has been following him. The boys put their heads together and come to the conclusion that someone else was there the night they killed the burglar and whoever it was saw it all happen. Now they are being stalked by that person and they have to find a way to put that guy down before he puts them down.

Meanwhile, the burglar’s body is pulled out of the river and Detective Patterson (played by Judy Reyes from Scrubs) is put on the case. During the autopsy, she is shown a scrap of paper that was in the dead man’s pocket. On it is Aaron’s name and home address. She realizes that Aaron is somehow connected to the two murders, and when his poker buddies start dropping dead, it becomes obvious that he is right at the center of it, even if he doesn’t understand it all himself.

The film throws a wicked twist at you in the third act that actually makes sense. For every suspense thriller I’ve seen, there is maybe 1 in twenty that have satisfying twist-ending and this is that one in twenty. All the while I kept thinking that all these intriguing plot points would collapse into a laughably-bad shock ending, but when I got to the shock ending I was actually quite surprised by how simple, yet completely plausible and gratifying it turned out to be. How refreshing to find a modern-day film that tries to trick you and actually manages to do it by not really giving you all the pieces of the puzzle until you’re ready for them. I wish I could say more, but I don’t want to spoil it.

This film also does something that most indie thrillers haven’t done for me in a while, and that’s keep me interested the whole way through. It starts like a conventional thriller, then goes off into uncharted territory and as the story developed it had me with it the whole time, trying to figure out the eventual end game. This may not be any huge landmark for indie thrillers, but it was a fun watch and it will definitely keep you entertained. The disc comes with a commentary track where Schaech and director Tim McCann provide a lively and informative accompaniment to the captivating film.