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Apartment Zero [1988] In Buenos Aires, mother-dominated Anglo-Argentine Adrian LeDuc [Colin Firth], manager of a repetory cinema, takes in brash American Jack Carney [Hart Bochner] as a tenant. After the charming young man has become a hero to all the other tiresomely daffy tenants of the apartment building, Adrian realises he is in fact a mad killer, late of the military dictatorship's death squads. A repressed spinsterish individual whose favourite film is probably Peeping Tom, Adrian becomes fascinated with Jack, and joins him as a partner in crime, collaborating with the disposal of a corpse, and after Jack's death transforming himself into another psycho, preserving his dead friend's body in the flat for company and dressing up in leathers to walk the night. An extended, fairly draggy psycho-thriller, caught somewhere between
whimsy and meanness, this has effective, edgy performances which don't
make up for the attenuated storyline and general meandering feel. The
Buenos Aires setting is distinctive, with British biddies Dora Bryan
and Liz Smith somehow marooned in a decaying South American block of
flats that has more than a whiff of Roman Polanski's backlist about
it. Argentine-born American director Martin Donovan, whose credits range
from the werewolf western Mad at the Moon to the Amanda
Donohoe Bitch-From-Hell thriller The Substitute, collaborated
with future blockbuster specialist David Koepp on the screenplay. Donovan
made Apartment Zero from the script, but Koepp bizarrely
kept working on it and a year later Bad Influence -
his own, very different version - was shot in Hollywood by Curtis Hanson,
with James Spader and Rob Lowe taking over from Firth and Bochner. First published in this form here. Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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