"My mother - what is the phrase - she isn't quite herself today."

If that line brings on a shiver of recognition, you're going to love Shooter. Director Ren Savant has cribbed substantially from Hitchcock's well-thumbed 1959 playbook (note particularly the use of the Characters Reflected In Mirrors To Show Their Duplicity motif) in this convoluted story of a lonely-hearts murderer that wavers between being a whodunit and a whatthehellisgoingonhere.

Lori Michaels is very impressive as a woman who is shall-we-say-demanding in bed (in one scene, she pulls herself up into a piledriver position and asks the guy "Well, you gonna fuck me?") and whose partners wind up dead with targets lipsticked on their chests. Or maybe it's her mother (Sharon Mitchell) who's doing the murdering: One threeway climaxes with Michaels suddenly turning into Mitchell and going around for a second lap. Michaels, natch, had a problem with incest with her stepfather, or maybe she didn't, and was traumatized by getting caught with stepdad by Mitchell, or maybe she wasn't, and she gets scary insinuating phone calls from Mitchell, or maybe she doesn't. Detective Mike Horner is on the case, hectored by chief Wilde Oscar, both of whom manage to bed Michaels before the vid ends.

Sex scenes are numerous, at least six, ranging from a quick anal encounter with Horner and Inari Vachs in a maintenance closet under a swinging lightbulb(!) to a g/g with Mitchell and Alexandra Silk. Director Savant tries for high production values, with a lot of night shots, but is tripped up by details like big black cables snaking through a bedroom, big production lights reflected in headboard mirrors, and one moment where the camera op catches his own shadow as he trucks into a window.