What an uninteresting hodge-podge. It could have been something more but no imagination seems to have gone into the script or the direction. A man is framed for murder by his wife and her lover. The conspirators do a pretty thorough job of making him look guilty. But the man (Richard Thomas), whose psychiatric records reveal him as "stable" and "unimaginative", manages to escape from jail, beat it to the conspirator's beach house, and secretly record a conversation between them in which they reveal their guilt. Then he accidentally drops the tape recorder with all the evidence on it into the sea water but manages to retrieve it. He shows a heck of a lot of creativity and improvisational skill for an unimaginative guy, if you ask me.
The tape is now damaged goods but it's enough to break down the wife's lover and he sobs out his confession. Bad people are punished. Good people are saved.
The location shooting is impressive. The beach house is nothing more than a wooden exterior thrown up on the grounds of Fort Fisher Battlefield on the Cape Fear peninsula. The house was torn down immediately after the production wrapped.
It's a pretty place. Unfortunately it's a little hard to see because someone seems to have shot every scene through a pair of pantyhose stretched over the camera lens. It's all very fuzzy. And for all the natural splendor of the location the viewer never gets a real sense of place, of what the sand feels like, of the texture of the gray bark on the stunted evergreens.
The acting is okay but the performers have nothing much to work with. The best performance, as is often the case, is given by Dick Olsen as a sleazy but not unsympathetic defense lawyer. Virginia Madsen radiates infidelity with every beat of her eyelashes. Ted McGinley is within his range as an immoral weakling.
The musical score neatly blends the ominous with the mysterious and is effective. If you want to hear the original, from which this was ripped off, rent Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and listen to Bernard Hermann's suspenseful theme.
I can't think of any particular reason to catch this one except utter boredom.
The tape is now damaged goods but it's enough to break down the wife's lover and he sobs out his confession. Bad people are punished. Good people are saved.
The location shooting is impressive. The beach house is nothing more than a wooden exterior thrown up on the grounds of Fort Fisher Battlefield on the Cape Fear peninsula. The house was torn down immediately after the production wrapped.
It's a pretty place. Unfortunately it's a little hard to see because someone seems to have shot every scene through a pair of pantyhose stretched over the camera lens. It's all very fuzzy. And for all the natural splendor of the location the viewer never gets a real sense of place, of what the sand feels like, of the texture of the gray bark on the stunted evergreens.
The acting is okay but the performers have nothing much to work with. The best performance, as is often the case, is given by Dick Olsen as a sleazy but not unsympathetic defense lawyer. Virginia Madsen radiates infidelity with every beat of her eyelashes. Ted McGinley is within his range as an immoral weakling.
The musical score neatly blends the ominous with the mysterious and is effective. If you want to hear the original, from which this was ripped off, rent Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and listen to Bernard Hermann's suspenseful theme.
I can't think of any particular reason to catch this one except utter boredom.