BEFORE: And just like that, it feels like the month is almost half over. Geez, that was quick - it feels like May 1 was just a couple of days ago.
Bruce Willis carries over from "Mortal Thoughts", and I'm back on the serial killer beat.
THE PLOT: A serial killer is back in Pittsburgh to torment the former homicide detective who was on his trail years before.
AFTER: At first glance, this film appears to share quite a bit of its DNA with "Twisted", the first film in my serial killer chain. A homicide detective with a dead father and a complicated family has a killer targeting all of his/her ex-lovers, and this causes suspicion to fall on the cop. Oh, and the main character sleeps with his/her cop partner, which is probably against regulations somehow.
But "Twisted" focused on a female detective, and this one focuses on a male detective. "Twisted" was set in San Francisco, and this one's set in Pittsburgh. See? Totally different. Apparently Pittsburgh is all about the rivers - and people are always either jumping into them, or tossing bodies into them.
The other main difference? "Twisted" sucked, and this one's quite watchable - up to a point, at least. There are twists, but not too many, and most of them are believable, except for the ones that aren't. I guess you could say this mines the same territory as "Tightrope" too - and that's what I'm all about, finding the connections between films. It helps to see what elements are common to films in the same genre, because then I can tell which films are doing things differently, in order to stand out.
Plus, even though in both cases the central character is at least suspected of killing their ex-lovers, in "Twisted" we are supposed to believe that a young woman could do that while passed-out drunk. Here a lot of evidence leads the cops to Bruce Willis' character - but in a way, blood evidence in a cop's house doesn't make much sense. Wouldn't a cop know not to leave blood evidence behind? So here the very obvious evidence in his house actually sort of clears him, in a roundabout sort of way.
But there are still gaps - things that are unexplained or never fully followed up on. Like why does the killer call the police and play the song "Little Red Riding Hood" over the phone after each murder? Sure, it's a great old song by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, but why THAT song? Because that's the song the filmmakers could get the rights to?
I won't give away the twist, but one of the actors in this film famously gave the big one away while appearing on Late Night with David Letterman. Oops.
Also starring Sarah Jessica Parker (last seen in "The First Wives Club"), Dennis Farina (last seen in "The Mod Squad"), Tom Sizemore (last seen in "Natural Born Killers"), John Mahoney (last seen in "Reality Bites"), Robert Pastorelli (last seen in "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit"), Brion James, Timothy Busfield, Andre Braugher (last seen in "Salt").
RATING: 5 out of 10 policeman's ball tickets
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