Left to Die

2012 "A Daughter's Fight for her Mother's Freedom."
5.6| 1h30m| NR| en
Details

With help from U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, Tammi Chase (Rachael Leigh Cook) fights to free her mother (Barbara Hershey) from an Ecuadorean prison.

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Reviews

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.
Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.
Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.
mst900 Why do all the movies & documentaries about white Americans in particular imply that they are innocent victims of barbaric third world countries' drug laws? They are depicted as completely gullible, innocently duped, scammed, coerced, or just trying to make ends meet by doing one innocent drug deal. The stories always go out of their way to make the audience enraged about the inhumane conditions outside the enlightened modern day humane U.S. system. In fact, abuses of this sort and worse happen daily in this country. The mentally ill, underage, and poor are physically, emotionally and psychologically tormented and permanently scarred. Isolation, rapes, beatings, huge financial profits by privatized prisons in this country have created a mass incarceration system that now moves babies with tantrums into the prison system for profit. Young ppl, especially minorities are economic fodder for this human rights disgrace because if you build it, you must fill it. The Pa. judges were putting young ppl, students (and they were white) into jails for truancy, disrespecting teachers by drawing unflattering pictures of them by the students and all sorts of excuses so the judges who had stock in these detention facilities as shareholders could increase their profits. We live in a country that imprisons more ppl than communist China, Russia and N. Korea together. 10s of thousands of ppl per day are arrested. 85% of them are never formally charged or convicted, but this allows overtime and monies to be made by the ruling oligarchy. Tax free padded police pensions in New York, judges' salaries, corp supply companies-food, laundry, etc.-all profit in the 100s of billions from the corrupt mega corp that is the U.S. injustice system.An aside regarding the authenticity of the story-How did the protagonist keep her gray hair in check all that time? The prison must have allowed Lady Clairol to visit along with the Botox/Juvederm/and plastic surgery touch-ups. Anothe problem with American TV-too much Hollywood.The daughter plays a nun who wears make-up.
gamay9 I am a divorced white male who can cook very well,like classical music, play the piano fairly well and am not an anti femi-nazi (ala Rush Limbaugh).This film was engaging, especially since it was based upon a true story. Sandra Chase was the name of the lead character (portrayed by Barbara Hershey) in this film and, also, an X-rated film, 'Insatiable,' starring Marilyn Chambers. I prefer the latter.Sandra explains to a nun that 'perhaps I am not a good person.' Perhaps she is just a person who cannot stand growing old. She ties up with a much younger, virile looking guy who speaks Spanish and takes off with him to Ecuador, hardly knowing him. The son and daughter think it's 'cool.' I knew a woman just like that, but she was only six months older than me. She wanted a pre-nup because her late husband left her with a $500K insurance policy and she didn't want to share the money with myself or her children, so I left her. Then, as she grew older, she felt lonely and married a much younger man who took her money. 'Vanity' is one of the seven capital sins and will come back to haunt one, although Sandra didn't deserve quite that much grief. Another reviewer, from Ecuador, stresses that the country is not as portrayed in the film. I believe her. No wonder other countries dislike the U.S.Maybe, Sandra was right when she said '...perhaps I am not a good person.'
wizartd This movie depicts the true 1997 story of the anti-American injustices and backwards legal system experienced by 53 yr old "Anti-Drug" Sandra Chase (played by Barbara Hershey), who was held without trial or due process for nearly two years even while terminally ill in an Equadoran Prison (in Quito). Although claiming complete innocence, In real life, Sandra Chase (one of many) experienced beatings by other inmates, deplorable inhuman stench conditions, where prisoners are forced to defecate in the hallways (no toilets in overcrowded small cemented cells), where prison guards who take bribes and payoffs repeatedly brutally rape, beat and mentally abuse American prisoners. To make matters worse, Sandra Chase was denied medical treatment for her scelroderma, a fatal rare disease that attacks the skin and organs and was eventually thrown into a dungeon like atmosphere without food or clean water for 5 days, and when fed, barely surviving on chicken parts and vegetables (not depicted in the movie). "My bible was the only thing they didn't steal," Chase said, "That's the only thing that kept me going".There are scores of other Americans being held in Ecuadoran prisons. Since Rep. Brown's intervention, over 800 prisoners have been released and more than 2,000 are slated to be set free. Still, the backlog of cases creates a system where the innocent are punished more harshly than the guilty and families are incarcerated for a crime of one member. A Typical Situation, Rep. Brown said the Chase case is typical of many of the estimated 58 Americans being kept in deplorable conditions in Ecuadorian prisons.After watching the movie, I became outraged that so much bias and anti-American prejudice actually exists in such barbaric conditions by the Equadoran unjust and backwards legal system, not to mention, the high degree of danger of possible false arrest during your stay, for anything that would warrant an excuse to throw innocent U.S. victims into hellish prison conditions. Even if guilty, the punishment of such inhuman conditions hardly fits the crime, where you will be instantly treated as guilty before having any chance of proved innocent. To make matters worse, never knowing how many years before you even get a trial (with the possibilities of ending up with one of their non English, Spanish speaking lawyers}, You'll never know! Question I'm asking myself is, How many Americans or non So. American citizens have died in this countries stench overcrowded prisons? I gave this movie 10 out of 10 for it's descriptive warning like effect as a "Wake Up Call" for those who may have otherwise felt safe traveling abroad in drug trafficking 3rd world countries. No spoilers for the movie were used, other than my brief explanation of the true events. Point being, before traveling anywhere outside the U.S., It would be very wise to educate yourselves before leaving U.S. American soil and know what you are truly up against. Why take chances!
flh462002 It's another in the "Americans are never guilty" parade of films. The notion that US citizens are always duped victims in drug smuggling cases is naive at best. While they may not deliberately smuggle drugs in all cases, having worked in travel for many years I can declare that US citizens can be extremely gullible when abroad and equally gullible that "I'm a US citizen" immunizes them from local laws. This is a quite nicely predictable "US citizen unjustly imprisoned" film, and all the predictable people are evil and in league against the poor US citizen. That Americans are naive does not mean they are immune to legal consequences. "I was suckered" is too frequently heard abroad to serve as a defense. And being familiar with Ecuadorian government and law, I can say that they are not exactly the rampant fascists portrayed in this film