Burning Palms

A 2010 American satirical thriller film directed by Christopher Landon in his directorial debut, it is an anthology of five intertwining stories, each set in a different Los Angeles neighborhood and exploring different social taboos. In "The Green Eye," Dedra Davenport (Rosamund Pike) confronts the disturbing intimacy between her fiancé Dennis (Dylan McDermott) and his 15-year-old daughter Chloe (Emily Meade), leading to a tragic outcome. In "That Little Piggy," Jeannie Bai (Jamie Chung) agrees to an unusual sexual experiment with her boyfriend Chad (Robert Hoffman), only to begin suffering from a persistent body odor that she cannot eliminate. "Buyer's Remorse" follows a gay West Hollywood couple, Tom (Anson Mount) and Jerry (Peter Macdissi), who adopt a silent seven-year-old African girl but fail to cope as parents and ultimately abandon her. In "Kangaroo Court," a group of spoiled boys discover that their housekeeper, Blanca (Paz Vega), is keeping the umbilical cord of her dead baby, and it is soon revealed that she killed her child to get revenge on an unfaithful partner. In "Man Eater," Sarah Cotton (Zoe Saldana) is raped, but later finds her rapist's (Nick Stahl) wallet and, rather than go to the police, seeks to commit further violence. The film, made on a $5 million budget, grossed only $3.2 million at the box office and received generally negative reviews from critics for its superficial handling of provocative themes and lack of narrative depth.