Cheap Tender Loving Care (Interactive DVD) (DVD) (Rob Landeros, David Wheeler) Price

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Customer Reviews of Tender Loving Care (Interactive DVD)

For the best enjoyment value, look at it as a test, rather than as a "game" or a "movie."

This also has high enjoyment value if you can get your friends to play it. The voyerism level is much higher than in a traditional movie - you not only watch the action, you sneak around between scenes and look into drawers, read diaries and private e-mails, etc. When you use this DVD on your friends, you get to watch -them- doing it.

Promising, but filled with problems nonetheless.
All in all, I did get some enjoyment out of Tender Loving Care. You have two actors out of four leads delivering pretty good performances, it's mostly fairly well shot, and I love the concept of interactive movies. However, there were some major pitfalls:

1. The settings are incredibly stagnant. They should have varied the locations much, much more.

2. This film moves at a snail's pace. Too much time is spent on too little plot, and though the dialogue isn't badly written, there is simply too much of it. This story should have taken about half the time it did to unfold.

3. Not enough variety. As with the forerunner of the interactive film, the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books of the '80s, I want drastically different paths to be available to me by my choices.

4. Bad acting from John Hurt (whose role is that of a redundant, annoyingly intrusive narrator) and Marie Caldare (as catatonic wife Allison), whose pussycat whining gets annoying incredibly quickly. Michael Esposito and Beth Tegarden fare much better, one with his complicated character and the other with her enigmatic seductiveness, though because of the overlong script, even they wear thin.

5. Too many questions. At a certain point, I just want to keep moving rather than click, click, click.

You need a lot of patience to get through this one. I did find it fun overall, but Tender Loving Care is far from the complete "coming of age" of interactive movies.

Clever format -- can't wait to see more
DVD is such a young format that you've got to make allowances for problems with some of the earlier entries. That said, this film/game/whatever you want to call it was great fun and really flowed very well.

As the film progressed, you answered questions and took personality tests that effected the outcome -- you could even read the observations the John Hurt character made about YOU based on your answers. And his observations were amusingly accurate sometimes.

The only problem seemed to be in a storytelling standpoint -- plot threads would begin but never really resolved. I suspect this is not due to neglect on the part of the storyteller, however, but because the track of the story I ultimately followed was not one dependant on those threads, and they are fleshed out better in other versions of the film. I look forward to watching this movie again with different answers to see how else it may have played out.

Brief warning -- if you want to watch the whole thing in one sitting, be prepared to reserve about four hours. Also, some of the questions Dr. Turner asks are VERY personal -- don't watch with other people that you don't already trust very well.