Shoot Or Be Shot (2002)

[trekgeezer]

 Harvey Wilkes (William Shatner), a delusional author who writes instruction manuals, starts off the film giving a speech on giving up literature and going into screenwriting. Too bad for him that this doesn't get him out of the mental institiution.

Sleazeball cheap action movie producer Jack Yeagar(Harry Hamlin) is looking for a new kind of film to produce.

He gets hooked up with Ben Steinman (Scott Rinker), a young experimental film maker, who just got kicked out by mom. Their idea is to shoot a movie without a script, just a defining event which the actors can then adlib from.

They get their defining event when Harvey escapes and runs across the group. He observes them for a few days before taking them hostage at gunpoint and demanding they shoot his script.

I was disappointed in this movie.  Shatner and Hamlin are the bright spots (and get all the good lines) in the film, but even they can't help it overcome the boring first hour.

The funniest scenes with Shatner are a rant about all those VCR's blinking 12:00, because people don't read the manual, and that nobody realized that one of his manuals was written in iambic pentameter.


 Look for Tim Thomerson as Hamlins uncle who runs the rundown motel where most of the action takes place.

Worth glance at if you are a big Shatner fan