By Richard Winters
My Rating: 4 out of 10
4-Word Review: Baseball score and murder.
Mike Seaver (Roy Scheider), a police detective, is put in charge of investigating a series of bizarre murders where women, some of them prostitutes, are murdered along the beaches of Galveston, Texas after each Houston Astros home game where pitcher Silvio Baretto achieves a victory. There are initially no suspects and it all seems to be a coincidence until Seaver ties the clues together and hones in on the killer while quarreling with Witty (Lane Smith) a state investigator brought in to help him with the case, but who has opposing ideas as to how to approach it.
The story is a strange mixture wanting to feed-off of the slasher films of the 80’s while also tying it to a sports themed flick, that was also popular during that decade, but manages to fail on both ends. The killings aren’t imaginative enough to attract a horror audience while the gore is much too graphic for those just looking for a slick thriller and thus both types of viewers will get put-off with this pretty quickly. Fans of sports movies won’t like it either as the baseballs scenes are brief and fleeting. While it’s kind of fun to see the Astros old color bar uniforms as well as watching actual game footage shot inside the old Astrodome, which at one time was coined ‘the 8th wonder of the world’ it hardly seems necessary especially since a TV-movie ‘Murder at the World Series’, which came out in 1977, had a very similar storyline that also included the Astros and Astrodome making this seem like a cheap, uninspired rip-off of that one.
The plot at least, while still dated especially on the technology end, takes a realistic approach to being a detective and how hard it is to find clues that can help piece the case together and lead to an actual suspect. Scheider, who was 57 at the time and looking it, manages to give it some energy and this was helped no less than by casting Richard Bradford as his nervous and pensive superior whose white hair and old school ways helps to offset Scheider’s wrinkles despite the fact that Scheider was in real-life 2 years older. The side stories though dealing with Smith coming in to butt heads with Roy doesn’t get played-up enough to be interesting and Scheider squabbling with his mother-in-law over a color TV that he got her drags the pacing down and hurts the tension of the mystery, which is where the sole focus of the script should’ve stayed.
Spoiler Alert!
What really ruins it though is the stupid ending. For one thing people in big cities, and Houston is the 4th largest one in the US, get murdered all the time, so having a cop able to somehow tie it to when a pitcher wins a game was too much of a stretch as technically there’s likely to be a murder happening somewhere whenever ANY pitcher wins a game and there needed to be more direct clues, like the killer sending cryptic notes to the police, or media, stating what his intentions were for it to realistically come together for the investigators.
The man playing the murderer, Rex Linn, who is supposedly a former pitcher who got cut from the team and then ultimately loses his hand in an accident and has it replaced with a hook, looks more like an disheveled, beer bellied truck driver who never played a sports game in his life. His motivations, to kill someone whenever the pitcher, who replaced him on the rotation, wins a game, in order to steal media attention away from the new pitcher’s success, is poorly thought out. It would’ve made more sense had the disgruntled man gone after the pitcher directly by either threatening his life, or those of his family, or maybe even attempting to kill the general manager, or owner, since they were the ones directly responsible for cutting him instead of no-name hookers who usually don’t get a lot of news attention anyways when they’re killed and thus making the whole premise pretty vapid.
My Rating: 4 out of 10
Released: September 15, 1989
Runtime: 1 Hour 35 Minutes
Rated R
Director: Peter Masterson
Studio: Epic Productions
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, Tubi
Scopophilia 