Made with an amateurishness befitting its title and emitting a late-90s TV movie aesthetic that's actually kind of charming, "Up Against Amanda" is a pretty standard bunny boiler movie that, awful as it is, has a camp factor that makes it kinda fun. With hammy performances, ineptly staged fight and murder scenes, and a plot made of Swiss cheese, it tells the story of Amanda Lear's (Justine Priestley) journey from abused child to home-wrecking harlot with all the sensitivity and tastefulness you'd expect of the time and genre, while presenting the married man (David DeWitt) she cheats with then hungrily pursues as but a bumbling, ultimately decent guy who deserves to overcome her in the end. That's dubious enough, but the real bafflement comes from all the strange, continuity-defying scenes that crop up throughout the movie. At one point Amanda lures her former lover to a grave she has dug for him, strikes him in the head with a shovel and then... takes him into her house to be suffocated, before then returning him to the aforementioned flower patch grave. At another point Amanda listens in on a conversation between her crush and his wife (Karen Grosso, turning in the only good performance in the movie) and, upon learning that Richard has evidence linking her to her former lover's murder, seemingly teleports to Richard's house in order to cut the phone line before he reveals too much. And then there's that climactic scene with the car... But I digress! A bad, silly movie with nothing novel to say about its subject matter, but enjoyable in an ironic way.
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