By Richard Winters
My Rating: 2 out of 10
4-Word Review: Anchorwoman stalked by photographer.
Jamie Douglas (Morgan Fairchild) is a successful Los Angeles news anchor in a long-term relationship with her boyfriend Brandon (Michael Sarrazin). Living close-by is Derek (Andrew Stevens) a photographer who has become obsessed with her after viewing her from afar through his binoculars. He begins giving her unwanted phone calls that soon turn into menacing fan letters. He follows her where ever she goes and even breaks into her home, but nothing seems to scare him away and the police are unable to do anything about it. When his behavior becomes even more threatening Brandon buys Jamie a rifle and advises her to use it, but Jamie is initially not thrilled with the idea.
This is writer/director David Schmoeller’s second feature film after doing the highly overrated Tourist Trap, with this thing, despite a much bigger budget, being not much better than that one. Casting Fairchild in the lead is one of the bigger problems as she has too much of a cold, bitchy persona about her, even when she’s not trying to, that just doesn’t make her the type of person a viewer can warm-up to, or want to root for.
Derek, as the psycho, is a poorly fleshed-out character where it’s never clear why he’s propelled to stalk Jamie in the first place. Why is this good-looking guy, who seems to be making good money, and owns a nice house, so obsessed with a blonde news lady when there’s already a good-looking blonde named Julie (Wendy Smith Howard) whose shown an interest in him? Some may argue, as it gets alluded to near the end, that Derek is impotent, but if he can’t get it up for other women then why would he be able to do it with Jamie? If the answer is that he can only achieve erection through violence and control then there needs to be an explanation for what traumatic experiences in his life, or personality quirk, have brought him to become that way.
It’s also really annoying how Derek is able to constantly break-in to Jamie’s house and into her place of work without ever being impeded, or caught. You’d think with the amount of harassment he’s given her she’d make sure to bolt every door and lock every window and yet he’s able to somehow continually pop-in all the time without any hassle. It’s like he’s Barbra Eden from ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ and can just blink his way in as that’s pretty much what it comes-off looking like.
Schmoeller’s inept direction ruins any suspense. Case-in-point is when Jamie is inside her home reading a letter and the camera zooms into a broken trinket sitting on her beauty stand that had been clearly placed there by Derek earlier. Instead of allowing the tension to simmer, by leaving the viewer in the dark as to whether Derek was still in the house or not, Schmoeller instead cuts right away to show Derek hiding in the closet, so when he does finally jump out and frighten Jamie the viewer is not startled at all because we’re already expecting it. Same thing happens when Jamie is live on-the-air and reads a creepy message written by Derek on her teleprompter. It would’ve been far more of a shock to the viewer had we not seen Derek sneak in to write the message earlier and instead shared Jamie’s point-of-view and seeing it for the first time as she reads it.
Spoiler Alert!
The ending is where it jump-the-shark when Derek somehow stabs Brandon, who is in a hot tub, in the back with a kitchen knife used to cut apples. Hard to believe that type of knife would be sharp enough to stab someone with and even harder to imagine that Derek was able to do it by standing on the edge of the tub and throwing it through the air towards Brandon with such perfect aim and impact that it penetrated his back and kills him instantly.
He then allows Jamie to get out of the tub, she was in it when Brandon got knifed, and get dressed while Derek goes off to bury Brandon’s body, but why does he feel the need to bury the body and why isn’t he afraid that while he’s away she’ll use this time to either call the police, or escape to a neighbor’s house? Having Jamie finally use the rifle and attempt to shoot Derek with it leaves open a few plot holes as well as she made clear earlier that she didn’t like the idea of the gun making it seem that she had never used one, so when she finally does you’d think she’d be unable to correctly work-it.
The original ending had the police chief, played by Vince Edwards, coming in at the last second and blowing Derek away, but the studio didn’t like this version so it got changed to where Julie kills Derek instead, but I didn’t like this either. Derek is Jamie’s problem, so it’s up to her to finish him off. My version would’ve had Jamie immediately run into the house and grab the rifle after Derek kills Brandon and then while still nude chase Derek, with rifle in hand, back to his house where she would finally riddle him with bullets. The final shot would’ve had her sitting nude on Derek’s sofa smoking a cigarette while Derek’s dead body lay at her feet. A voice-over of her reading the news story as an anchorwoman of what had occurred would then be heard.
My Rating: 2 out of 10
Released: January 22, 1982
Runtime: 1 Hour 44 Minutes
Rated R
Director: David Schmoeller
Studio: AVCO Embassy Pictures
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube
Scopophilia 