Devil's Pond
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The Devil's Pond | |
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Devil's Pond movie poster |
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Directed by | Joel Viertel |
Produced by | Jed Baron Bill Block John Davis |
Starring | Tara Reid Kip Pardue Meredith Baxter Dan Gunther Guy Graves |
Distributed by | Artisan Entertainment |
Release date(s) | 2003 |
Running time | 92 min. |
Language | English |
IMDb profile |
Devil's Pond (alternatively known as Heaven's Pond) is a movie starring Kip Pardue and Tara Reid. In the movie an abusive marriage is illustrated, starting with a husband who seems ideal but then gradually shows several warning signs, culminating in physical violence. In Devil's Pond, the husband is fed up with all the ugliness in the world, and wants to return to a traditional 19th century lifestyle, and just wants everything to be perfect, neurotically so. He isolates his wife from her family and friends, and tries to control every detail to try to make things the way he wants them to be.
When he finds out that she secretly left their cabin against his will, he loses his temper and tries to kill her, but she successfully traps his leg with an animal trap. He begs her to kill him, but she just leaves a gun, and he kills himself. At the closing scene, she takes off her wedding ring and leaves it on his truck's front-door knob, and then walks off onto a new life without the abusive husband. Throughout the movie he was saying she was unable to do anything by herself, but by the end of the movie she shows a lot of independence:
- The careful planning of the animal trap
- Setting up the gun so he can kill himself
- Swimming despite fear of water
- Leaving the ring on the door-knob
Some of the warning sings of being an abusive husband that the husband shows are:
- Pretending he doesn't hear her when she asks if she'd love him if she were fat
- Becoming angry/moody/violent if she would ask about the lockbox or its contents
- Grabbing her wrist and ignoring when she says he's hurting her
- Hiding her birth control pills so that he can impregnate her to try to force her to stay
- Sinking the only boat off their island so that she can't escape
- Exploiting her fear of water to keep her from escaping.