My review was written in July 1989 after watching the movie on South Gate Entertainment video cassette.
An American film noir in the French tradition, "Tainted" is a well-shot and acted thriller that unfortunately relies on too many unbelievable plot pegs.
Lensed in 1894 in Hendersonville, North Carolina, pic was planned for theatrical release by Film Concept Group under the title "Body Passion", but surfaces belatedly in video stores instead.
Shari Shattuck toplines as a small-town teacher married to mortician Gene Tootle and resented by her sister-in-law Park Overall. Her world falls apart one evening when a prowler (Blaque Fowler) breaks into her home and attacks her. Tootle arrives and kills the prowler in the nick of time, but suffers a fatal heart attack.
Instead of telling the police, Shattuck decides to cover up the incident, fearing small-town disapproval of her involvement in such violent doings. She successfully stages a mock-death of her husband in his car and buries the rapist in the backyard.
She is forced to involve Overall in the body disposal coverup (in return for ownership of the family mortuary business she's inherited) when workmen start digging up the grounds. Pic climaxes at the crematorium with greedy violence breaking out via Overall and her workman lover, Magilla Schaus.
With echoes of such French classics as "Rider on the Rain" and "Diabolique", filmmaker Orestes Matacena creates some suspenseful sequences, but it's hard to swallow much of the characters' behavior, notably that imposed on Overall's role. Shattuck and Overall (latter now a tv regular on "Empty Nest") are arresting-looking and forceful heroines topping an interesting cast, all of whom bear odd stage names.
Ramon Suarez' cinematography is topnotch.
