Cross Country (1983)

Ad “creative director” Evan Bley (Richard Beymer) is starting on a hastily planned road trip from his native New York to California. Surely, this may or my not have something to do with the fact that his – half secret – girlfriend was brutally murdered in her bed. Even before Evan has left New York, we learn that he’s a pretty angry and violent kind of guy. In a strip joint, he picks up dancer/would-be actress Lois (Nina Axelrod) who seems to push a lot of his sexual buttons, gets into a violent altercation, and then finds himself waking up on the backseat of his car, well, actually in Lois’s lap, while Lois’s friend John (Brent Carver) does the driving.

Obviously, a heated melange of sex and violence, secrets and lies ensues between these three; none of them’s a particularly pleasant character, and they all seem to have problems with sex, dominance, and violence in all their combinations.

At the same time, we regularly pop in with the man investigating the killing of Evan’s girlfriend, one Detective Roersch (Michael Ironside). After some time of beating people up and/or threatening them, Roersch hits on Evan as his most probable suspect. He’s not going to file that in any report, but is instead planning on finding Evan and blackmailing him to pay for the treatment of Roersch’s ill wife. Which, come to think of it, is probably the purest motive any character in this movie has for doing anything, yet also fits nicely into the film’s thematic thrust.

For thematically, Paul Lynch’s early neo noir/proto erotic thriller Cross Country is very much concerned with all the shitty horrible things people are willing for to do for love, sex, or the things they believe are one of these; it’s also interested in the more subtle ways dominance expresses itself in human relationships, featuring more then one scene in which the most obviously dominant character is not at all the one in control of the situation. This does fit nicely with the noir traditions the film obviously moves in, only no studio era Hollywood film would ever have dared even suggest to express its ideas about people and the world they inhabit in sex scenes quite as explicit, steamy, and often uncomfortable as the ones here. And really, once the erotic thriller as a genre was much more codified than it is here in its infancy, it quickly became impossible again to go quite this far into the more unpleasant recesses of the human mind while showing a lot of naked flesh.

Needless to say, nobody in this movie is a particularly pleasant person, but it escapes the curse of the classic “why should I care about any of these assholes” by also making them unpleasant in human and understandable ways, really mirroring rather typical human failures in businesses of the heart and the productive organs on a more intense scale.

Lynch is a interesting director, having a huge filmography in TV, but frequently dipping into the sleazier and more interesting parts of the silver screen as the director of nearly forgotten (and basically unavailable) gems like this, or rather less gem-like and certainly not forgotten movies like the first Prom Night. Lynch’s work here is stylish and intense, focussing on a world that’s dark and grimy, appropriately people by sweaty characters of dubious morals, giving the whole affair a nightmare noir quality that shines through even in the muddy VHS-based version that seem to be the only way to see the film right now.

The acting’s pretty fantastic throughout, the four main actors all portray their characters with intensity and ambiguity, always suggesting emotions not honestly expressed and a sexual and emotional intensity which feels wrong in all the right ways. Which really is a good way of describing the whole of Cross Country.

Murder by Night (1989)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

The charmingly named “Claw Hammer Killer” is haunting the nightly streets of New York, murdering women, as these guys inevitably do. His latest exploits are a bit below the standards of your typical ultra-competent movie serial killer, though, when one of his victims runs into a car, causing a crash and an explosion. Caught in said explosion is one Alan Strong (Robert Urich), probably out jogging at that moment, or something.

Neither we nor he do know what Alan was actually doing, for he suffers from a hefty bout of amnesia that leaves his past near and far a total vacuum to him. Apparently, he soon learns, he’s the reclusive owner of a successful restaurant he never enters, as well as the owner of a load of crappy modern art in his living room. He’s also a cipher to the world as much as he is to himself. Well, unless you’re the cop investigating the Claw Hammer Murders, that is. For said cop, one detective Carl Madsen (Michael Ironside) doesn’t buy Alan’s amnesia at all, and believes him to be a rich guy trying to avoid the trouble that comes with witnessing a murder.

Karen Hicks (Kay Lenz), the police psychologist tasked with helping Alan, does not at all agree with that opinion, but then, she clearly has no professional ethics and can’t resist the old Urich charm, so she’s soon having an affair with her patient. Why, she’s so into him, she’s even going to stand by him once Alan as well as Madsen start to suspect Alan might not be a witness, but the killer himself.

Paul Lynch’s Murder by Night, a TV movie made for the USA Network whose TV movie output was specialized on making genre movies below the explicitness of HBO but rather above the usual network TV movie fare when it came to sex, violence, and bad ideas, is rather a nice example of the form. Well, one might complain that it doesn’t go quite as far with its basic concept as it could do, turning the whole affair into more of a gaslighting affair than the portrait of a man who doesn’t know himself getting into trouble. On the other hand, however, the killer and his plan are sufficiently nasty and ridiculous to base an effective little thriller on.

The film is of course – being a TV movie - a bit conservative in its construction, so anyone who knows this kind of film will cop relatively early to what is actually going on simply by knowing the basic structure of this kind of plot. Lynch sells it pretty well, though, timing reveals and reversals nicely, and making good use of Urich’s general nice guy image exactly to cause just enough doubt in the audience. Plus, there’s another TV nice guy actor playing the actual killer, so you gotta congratulate the movie for some cleverness here, too.

The cast is generally doing a fine job inside the constraints of what this is, Urich being likeable and confused, Jim Metzler being likeable and evil, Michael Ironside doing his patented driven asshole cop bit as convincing as he always does, and Lenz doing the best with what she is given.


So, all in all, Murder by Night is a nice little example of a well-made TV thriller, winning over hearts and minds, okay, my heart and mind, via the virtues of craftsmanship.

In short: Prom Night (1980)

A few years before the start of the film, and therefore pre-DISCO, a quartet of children kinda-sorta accidentally murdered one of their own. Being kids and all, they just run and pretend it didn’t happen, even when an innocent man is blamed for their crime and is horribly injured in a car chase. The supposed murderer has spent the last six years in a mental institution, but now he’s broken out, and he may or may not be out for vengeance.

He’s just in time for the anniversary of the death, too. Well, that and for prom night in the high school the now older kids go to. And look at that, someone wearing a glittering ski mask is carving a violent path through the kids and a couple of innocent bystanders! But is it truly that guy or someone else the film hasn’t spent more than a minute on before doing the deeds? And will the dead girl’s sister Kim – who didn’t have anything to do with the death – do what characters played by Jamie Lee Curtis in slasher movies do?

To be frank, no, she won’t exactly, for Paul Lynch’s Prom Night might want to drink from the money well of the slasher (there is such a thing, yes), yet is only beholden to parts of the more traditional slasher tropes. It’s a bit of a shame the film does eschew an actual final girl scene while keeping the obsession with the virginity of its characters (even though virgins die here too), but what can you do? In other regards, it’s a pretty typical slasher in form and function, though one that doesn’t go for much gore. One is nearly tempted to call the film classy, but then the next virginity discussion comes around, and I’m more tempted to call it fluctuating between squeamish and exploitative. So, it is a typical slasher.

Despite that, and the expected at times sloppy writing, the film still belongs in the upper third of films of the early slasher boom, mostly on the strength of some decent acting, a cast of characters you don’t necessarily want to see die in horrible ways, and first and foremost some damn good stalking scenes that make it a double shame the film doesn’t have a true final girl fight in the end. Lynch – assisted by Robert C. New’s cinematography and a string-heavy score by Paul Zaza and Carl Zittrer – shows himself highly adept at the classical suspense notions these scenes live on. The movement of characters into ever more tight and threatening spaces can hardly be done more effective than in the scene where Anne-Marie Martin kicks the bucket.

If that’s just not enough for a discerning viewer, Prom Night also recommends itself with a mind-blowing scene of disco dancing Mithun Chakraborty would be proud of, yet no words could describe appropriately, and a little finale between axe murderer and victims also set to the oh so appropriate tones of DISCO!