Deadly Friend
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/03/13/hilton.movie/index.html#cnnSTCVideo
Filmmaker and pal-o-mine Mark Bender, last spotted leaping from a third floor window in a dream I had last week (the actual waking-Mark is almost crazy enough to do something like that), emails to inform me of a startling development in his movie career.
“Check out this link to a story that ran yesterday on CNN here!
It is probably the weirdest thing we will ever here about my late great cinematic masterpiece: DEADLY RUN.
Wow, this freaked my mind!”
As well it might. DEADLY RUN, I’m sure Mark won’t mind me telling you, is a rather poor MOST DANGEROUS GAME rip-off, about a serial killer who abducts women, then hunts them in the woods. Mark was recruited to direct this straight-to-DVD blecch-buster by its financier/star, a weightlifter with delusions of talent who somehow was not quite crazy enough to think he could direct it himself, but who settled for preventing Mark from doing his job and refusing to follow any directions.
(Mark’s Big Suggestion was that the killer should hunt his victims while naked, painted red and wearing ANTLERS, which the muscleman refused to do. I kind of understand his reluctance, but Mark’s point was that this would have made for an unforgettable image to grace the video sleeve. Which is true.)
With its slightly unfocused script and sometimes amateurish cast (the only scary thing about the film’s killer is that he CHOSE to give the performance he does), the film doesn’t stand any chance of being good, but lest you blame Mark for this, you should check out the climax, which was re-shot behind his back by another director. Suddenly elementary continuity is suspended and the killer is TELEPORTING around by the magic of Bad Editing. This is maybe the most entertaining part because it’s solidly in the so-bad-its-good camp, with all traces of Mark’s professional touch ruthlessly expunged.
And now comes the news that the producer, a criminal lawyer, was taking script advice (the script is credited to one Joe Gillis, which is the name of William Holden’s screenwriter character in SUNSET BOULEVARD) from a guy who turns out to be a real-life killer a lot like the one in the movie. Which is the LEAST funny thing about this film, although arguably the closest it gets to dramatic irony.
“He was a criminal,” Rael said. “And he’d be the first to admit it. He might have been a sociopath, but he was a happy one and an animated one. One who, quite frankly, I never would have thought in a million years. … Well, he had criminal instincts, but he was not a violent person. I was wrong about that.”
The alternative is that the killer’s connection to the film is being exaggerated by the producer, in an attempt to shift a few more units, which would be beyond-belief sleazy, but not necessarily incredible from a guy who is both a B-movie producer and a lawyer…
I pressed Mark for a comment on all this.
“I think this is so weird and disturbing that I am freaked out! Man, my life gets weirder every blooming day!”
At any rate, I hope we aren’t going to get people claiming Gary Michael Hilton was turned into a killer by the corrupting experience of seeing the movie he helped write. This is actually more evidence for the opposite cause-and-effect argument, that rather than being turned into killers by violent movies, killers and other crumbs just like violent movies because that’s the kind of shit they’re into.
