Earlier this year, Melissa Joan Hart cancelled her Kickstarter project Darci’s Walk of Shame three weeks into its run, having reached just 2.5% of her gargantuan $2 million funding goal. “I need your help to prove to people that I’m more than just Clarissa or Sabrina,” she implored, eager to transform herself from pop cultural reference point into viable casting option. It was a fair request, even if I’d argue that she should worry less about Sabrina and more about stuff like Holiday in Handcuffs — or her queasy insistence on tweeting on behalf of her baby:
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One thing she failed to mention in the pitch for Darci was the outright failure of her last shot at turning around her public image: the 2010 abduction thriller Nine Dead. In the film (which just so happens to be produced by Melissa’s mother Paula and what of it) Hart plays Kelley, one of nine strangers kidnapped by a masked gunman and forced to solve a riddle in order to save their lives, Saw II-style. It’s a fairly transparent attempt by Hart to shake off her Nickelodeon past, climaxing in a visceral flashback sequence in which she beats a rapist to death with a baseball bat.
You can see that grim spectacle in the YouTube embed below, or burned onto your retinas indefinitely any time after that: