Z/Web

I’m surprised I never saw this 1991 thriller staring Sean Young and Matt Dillon. It’s definitely my genre. It opens with Dillon killing off his fiance in a shockingly calm way, and then killing more people to hide his crime. He later marries his dead fiance’s twin sister and we learn that this is all a ploy to get to her rich father. It’s a simple enough concept and we’ve seen similar stuff more recently, but I’m sure this was rather innovative twenty years ago. Seeing this now, though, it’s lacking in a lot of ways: a lot of the material is too “on the nose” and not very subtle; some of the editing and direction comes off as thriller-cliché (like the dropping the coffee cup in shock slow motion effect); the acting, particularly by Sean Young, is atrocious (I’d heard her described as wooden but I always thought she was decent, but she does a wonderful impression of a wooden doll doing an emotionless script read in this film); there are a couple awkward sex scenes which feel strangely artificial as though the director was mandated by some studio policy to include a certain about of sex; there’s no ambiguity or philosophical insight to anything — we just see a greedy killer doing bad things; and the ending is trite and not particularly satisfying. But despite all these flaws, the film is still interesting and above average. I rather liked it.