Product: Traces of Red [VHS] (1992)
Rating: 1.0
minor traces of skill
This interminable wannabe thriller set in Palm Beach and directed by Andy Wolk has many distinguishing features, none of them very good. Probably the best thing is Lorraine Bracco using her slow speech patterns to add character touches to her femme fatale role. However Wolk inexplicably doesn't know what to do with her, and eventually she gets shunted to the side, so he can bore us with the labrynthine plot convolutions of a search for a serial killer who over-applies Yves St Laurent ruby red lipstick clown-like to his victims. Wolk miscasts James Belushi as a womanising detective, as if his bull manner and loud-voice would appeal to women, though since the victims are all women associated with Belushi, that may be motivation enough. Belushi is the kind of policeman that litters in the street and in his own home, and has a fondness for faux big band music - Dinah Washington slaughtering These Foolish Things. One wonders if making some swamp bad guys all overweight is an attempt to scale down Belushi's own stockiness, and he pales next to Bracco in their scenes together, she making him look even more amateurish. The screenplay by Jim Piddock is full of impossible lines - "In Palm Beach there are 3 lives: public, private and secret", "time was money and the girls were bigtime", "Don't start asking me about my experiences. You could become one of them", "Don't try to make me into something I'm not. How do you know what you're not?", and "You're not who you thought you were, boy". The contextual assumption of Belushi's opening narration is taken from Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, but more troubling is the connection Piddock wants to make between child abuse and womanising. The narrative actually improves about of the way in when Belushi's partner, Tony Goldwyn takes over the investigation in Key West. He matches up better with Bracco, and a sex scene is more convincing than the ones in which Belushi participates, partly because Goldwyn is a more attractive specimen. Although Goldwyn doesn't have a leading man persona, he at least suggests more emotional depth and psychological dimension. Wolk gives Bracco's office a huge carpet with lipstick pattern, has her leave an apple in a fruit bowl with a bite taken out of it, puts heavy breathing on his soundtrack, and casts Edgar Allan Poe IV in a supporting role.