Tag Archives: rosanna arquette

Murder Mysteries in May: In the Deep Woods (1992)

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The thing about finding movies on the internet to watch is that you don’t always know where the movies came from. I mean there are the usual bad rips, or hardcoded subtitles, or the audio is the wrong language type of thing to deal with, but what I’m talking about is not necessarily knowing what kind of movie you’re about to watch. Is this a prestige Hollywood movie, or some straight-to-video release? Did it have a sizeable budget or were they working on a shoestring? It if has named actors, at what point in their career was this movie made? Were they famous when they made it?

Obviously, for a lot of movies, this is almost automatically known by me. I watch a lot of movies, I pay attention to movie reviews and news. In the vast majority of the films I watch I have some idea of what I’m getting into.

But not always.

Sometimes it is a surprise. Case in point: In the Deep Woods stars Rosanne Arquette, Anthony Perkins, Will Patton, and Amy Ryan. These are people I know. These are people I like. Those last two might not be household names, but I bet you’ve seen them in something. But Arquette and Perkins were stars.

It was made in 1992 which is a little late in Perkins’s career (in fact this was his last film) and a little early for Ryan (in fact this was her first film), but Will Patton had established himself as a solid character actor and Arquette was at the height of her powers.

Not that I was paying that much attention to the date of release when I picked this movie, I saw those names and some decent reviews on Letterboxd and pressed “play.”

What I didn’t realize is that this was a made-for-TV movie. Made for NBC in 1992. TV is different now. TV gets big budgets, big movie stars, and big prestige. In 1992 movies made for broadcast television were usually pretty lame.

Oh well, live and learn, and all that.

Arquette plays Joanna Warren a children’s book author. There is a serial killer on the loose who is dragging women into the woods, I mean The Deep Woods, and doing terrible things to them. Joanna might be his next victim (well, probably not his next victim because that would build our climax a little too quickly, but it is a safe bet he’ll go after her in the last act.

Perkins is the creepy old dude who might be a private investigator who might have some sort of relationship with one of the victims. He might have been hired by her parents. He lies a lot. The film plays up his potential to be the actual killer.

Patton plays the police detective assigned to the case. He keeps creeping on Joanna, asking her out on dates even though she repeatedly turns him down. The film periodically plays up his potential to be the actual killer.

Amy Ryan is Joanna’s sister, I think, or maybe just a friend. Her husband gets a little play as the potential killer, but mostly she’s just a gal pal Joanna can talk to amongst all the creepy dudes.

My favorite part of the film is that the killer is supposedly some kind of mastermind. He’s brutally killing these girls but leaving no clues, no fingerprints or DNA and there are definitely no witnesses. And yet the film continually shows us his crimes (well shows us as much as a TV movie from the early 1990s was allowed to show us) and it is often in daylight, and in public. One time we see him grab a girl in a busy parking lot. Two seconds before he grabs the lady we see extra walking around. Yet no witnesses.

This is a dumb movie. There are a few noir/Giallo touches that are nice, and Perkins is enjoyable – I mean his character is ridiculous, constantly obfuscating his motives for no reason – but he’s enjoyable to watch.

But watching it got me to thinking about made-for-TV movies from this era. This was before prestige TV. This was when television was considered a lesser medium than cinema. This was before streaming. Thirty-minute sitcoms and hour-long dramas ruled television. Now again they’d make a mini-series or a feature-length movie to show on a Monday night. Sometimes they’d get real celebrities to star in them. Their budgets were usually small and they tended to cater to the biggest possible audience. A serial killer movie fits that bill.

Thinking about In the Deep Woods in that context. Had I watched it at a time when there weren’t a thousand awesome shows in my queue and when I often watched whatever happened to be on. I might not have hated it. It would still be a long way from good, but I bet I’d enjoyed myself.

Awesome ’80s in April: 8 Million Ways To Die (1986)

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The other day I was in my local used bookstore and I picked up a copy of Lawrence Block’s 8 Million Days to Die. I don’t remember why I did. I’d never read a book from Block before. I read a lot of detective fiction so probably I’d just heard his name mentioned as a good writer of that genre. Anyway, I bought the book and read it. I liked it quite a lot.

It is the fifth book in Block’s series about Matthew Scudder an ex-cop, sort-of private eye. At no point did I feel I was missing anything having not read the previous four books in the series, but I liked it enough to know I wanted to start at the beginning. I still have been unable to find that first book in the series at the used store. Maybe I’ll have to buy it new.

Fast forward a few months and I got a review copy of a book entitled Into the Night by Cornell Woolrich. The manuscript of which was found unfinished in Woolirch’s desk when he died many years ago. Lawrence Block was tasked to finish it. I read it and reviewed it (which you’ll be able to read soon over at Cinema Sentries) and quite liked it.

Lawrence Block must have been on my brain because when I came across this adaptation of 8 Million Ways to Die I got all sorts of excited and watched it immediately. It is good enough that I wish they’d made half a dozen sequels and turned it into a television show.

It has been too long since I read the story to know how faithfully they adapted it to the screen. They definitely moved it from New York to Los Angeles, and I’m sure a lot of the details were changed, I don’t remember that ending at all, but the basics are there.

Jeff Bridges plays Matthew Scudder. He begins the film as a detective working for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. When a raid goes horribly wrong, ending with Scudder shooting a small-time drug dealer in front of his wife and kids, Scudder finds himself without a job and in a drunk ward. Cop politics handled the first, a several-day bender got him into the second.

At an AA meeting, someone hands him a note to be at a private gambling club at a certain time. There he meets Chance (Randy Brooks) the owner of the club, a high-class call girl named Sarah (Rosanne Arquette), and Angel Maldonado (Andy Garcia) a drug-dealing gangster. All three will become the major characters in our story.

But he also meets Sunny (Alexandra Paul) another call girl, the one who initially invited him to the party. She plays coy at first but eventually offers him $5,000 to ask Chance, who she says is her pimp, to let her leave town and leave the business for good.

Chance says he’s not her pimp, doesn’t have a hold on her at all, and has no problem with her leaving. By the next day she’s been brutally murdered.

Scudder isn’t the kind of guy – ex-cop or not, struggling alcoholic or not – to let that sort of thing go and so he’s on the case.

The script was originally co-written by Oliver Stone and R. Lance Hill with some rewrites added by Robert Towne. Director Hal Ashby was reportedly so drunk and stoned while filming that he was fired during post-production. A new editor was brought in who cut it to pieces and added some dialogue in post.

As such the film has a disjointed, shambolic feel to it. Ashby’s films often feel a little disheveled but this is even more so. There are abrupt cuts and references to things that never happened on screen (but clearly were intended to, and were probably cut).

It is also dingy and dirty, a modern film noir that isn’t afraid of the muck. Jeff Bridges is terrific as Scudder. He gets the look and feel of an alcoholic just exactly right. His performance is full of wonderful little details that make his character feel lived in. There’s definitely a touch of Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski in it, but more than that, too.

Rosanna Arquette is good as well, though her role doesn’t give her much to do. But really, this is Andy Garcia’s show. He’s terrific. Manic, and edgy. Charming, but always on the edge of violence.

It ends in a fury of shouting and violence that didn’t quite work for me. The whole film is a bit of a mess, to be honest, but also it’s kind of wonderful. I enjoyed living in this world for an hour and a half. I wish I could go back and make it a huge box office hit so we’d have more of these films with Jeff Bridges as Matthew Scudder.

Awesome ’80s In April: Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

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I feel like I’m going to spend the first few paragraphs of every review I write for this Awesome ’80s in April segment discussing the various memories I have associated with each film. I really had no idea these movies would bring back such memories, but here we are.

If you didn’t live through the 1980s it is hard to explain just how big of a star Madonna was. She was everywhere. She had a ton of radio hits that were in constant rotation on the airwaves. She made great videos that were repeatedly playing on MTV. She was on magazine covers and on talk shows. Madonna and Michael Jackson were the 1980s.

Desperately Seeking Susan was her first film role. She’s basically playing herself. Or at least the public persona she was presenting at the time. She’s the Susan of the title, a free spirit, punk rock sort of girl. We first meet her at a hotel where she’s just spent a free night of spirit-making with a mobster. Right after she leaves some other mobsters throw that guy out the window. Thinking she might be a testifying witness, mobster Wayne (Will Patton) spends the film looking for her to rub her out.

But first, we meet Roberta Glass (Roseanna Arquette) a bored, middle-class housewife who spends her days getting her hair done and reading the personal ads. She’s intrigued by one that says “Desperately Seeking Susan” and lists a time and a place to meet. She’s seen similar ads before and figures Susan and the desperate guy must meet regularly via the personals.

She thinks that’s romantic and decides to go to Battery Park and spy on the lovebirds. Through a series of rather silly events Roberta is mistaken for Susan and due to a bout of amnesia she winds up thinking she’s Susan too.

She meets a nice guy, Dez (Aidan Quinn) and they get into a series of adventures together. Meanwhile, the real Susan is looking for Roberta because she’s got the key to the storage locker where she’s got all her stuff. (The key was accidentally left in her jacket pocket which she sold to a thrift store and Roberta purchased after Roberta followed Susan around the city – I told you things got silly).

The plot isn’t really the point of this movie. It is something like a modern take on the classic screwball comedy. It wanders around some cool old sections of New York City and meets some wonderful characters (played by a who’s who of just getting their start New York actors including Laurie Metcalf, Stephen Wright, Jon Turturro, and Giancarlo Esposito).

Madonna is great in it. She really does seem to be playing herself, or to put it another way, this role feels like it was made specifically for her (though it wasn’t she had to beat out such wonderful actors as Goldie Hawn, Susan Sarandon, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Her wardrobe is full of that classic early ’80s New York City style that Madonna was famous for.

Arquette is great as well. It is really her movie and it follows her character as she changes from this bored housewife who is just going through the motions to someone finding her own sense of style and self. Madonna gets lauded for having her own unique sense of self, but Arquette holds her own. She’s such a unique performer.

Desperately Seeking Susan is another film that I’ve known about since it came out. It has been on my list of things to watch for ages, but for whatever reason, I never got around to it. The film is really fun, silly, and full of style. It is a time capsule of New York City as well and works as a perfect embodiment of the 1980s.