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Fresh off of The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), Amy Holden Jones turned to romantic drama and brought in Jamie Lee Curtis, who was looking for a change from horror herself. The story of a 40-year-old married man's affair with a 22-year-old woman may not be groundbreaking, but it is touching and felt authentic.

It's a quiet film but had several other positives, starting with Curtis, who aside from being gorgeous, showing her acting ability in a film filled with emotion. There are several steamy erotic scenes that threatened to become gratuitous, but I thought they were tastefully done (especially by today's standards) and integral to the story. That's what I'm telling myself anyway. The affair is echoed in letters that Curtis's character finds among her dead mother's things; it turns out she too had an affair, this one over many years with a man who truly loved her, and who was essentially in Curtis's position, the one on the outside. It's a little contrived but as Curtis sometimes uses words (and even writes an entire letter) out of the man's tender letters to her mother, we can see the commonality in the emotions of all affairs, and the impossible position they put everyone in.

There is also an interesting hint of abuse Curtis's character suffered at the hands of her father as a child; I loved the subtlety with how this was done, even if the way Matt Clark played the drunken rage of the man in the present was a tad hammy. James Keach is reasonably good as the married man, the one who wants to believe he's being "honest" by saying he's married up-front, but who is a massive hypocrite, and playing with the lives of everyone around him. I loved seeing Bud Cort and Amy Madigan in small parts too, as well as a few scenes around Venice, California and good old Randy's Donuts. Very nice ending in the graveyard too. Not quite sharp or deep enough to truly love, but a smaller film worth seeing.

Well, it is what it says it is, but since it was billed by the Criterion Channel as "a smart, subversive, and lightly satirical spin on the 1980's slasher formula" by lesbian feminist author Rita Mae Brown, I confess I was hoping for something a little different for the genre. Instead it's an incredibly generic take with a boring killer stalking teenagers who do the usual things before dying, you know, like taking showers so they can be ogled. That's because Brown's original script, a parody, was recast into a normal slasher film by the producers, which is too bad. The scene with the body in the fridge and the one with the pizza on the corpse were funny and I liked the ending, but that was about it. Mercifully it's just 76 minutes though.

"I want a lot of things - big things!"

I'm the opposite of gun crazy and stories involving couples who go on crime sprees generally haven't been my cup of tea, but this one was an exception, mainly because of the beautiful way it was shot and how good its leading couple was. Peggy Cummins and John Dall are fantastic here, oozing chemistry and passion so much that the romance is a big part of the film, even though it's under such screwed up circumstances for their characters. Him repeating to her that "we're going to make it" as she says "I'll try hard" leading in to a kiss is seriously steamy, as is the later scene when she says "let's finish it the way we started it - on the level" before leaning back in bed, waiting for him to climb on top of her (which of course can only be suggested because of the Production Code). There's also the very sweet moment when they intend to part in opposite directions to lay low for awhile but find they can't, turning their cars around to reunite.

There is a strong indie vibe to the film which adds to its appeal, especially as Joseph H. Lewis did some sophisticated work getting a bank robbery in one long take, added tension with tight shots out the back of a car window during a getaway, and gave us that eerie feeling in the fog at the end. My only misgiving about the film was just how much it made the woman the bad guy, since she's the one who puts the couple on this path and also the one that uses deadly force. Just in case that wasn't enough, she also makes it clear she's not above using a baby as a shield. The film blaming a downfall on a femme fatale was certainly typical for noir, but here I felt like it would have been better a little more balanced. Still, quite a wonderful little film.