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Dead Man's Curve [1998] Under the credits of Dead Man's Curve, which deftly establish the popular myth of the automatic As for the roommates of college suicides, campus therapist Dana Delaney outlines the tell-tale symptoms of incipient suicide in literary taste ['underlining passages in The Bell Jar would be a bad sign'], music ['anything from the 80s'] and movies ['first films from writer-directors ... I hate those']. Naturally, the punchline sets up writer-director Dan Rosen's credit, though it's fair to say that this project grows out of the student murderousness of his script for Stacy Title's The Last Summer. That film featured an apparently liberal, reasonable, feeling bunch of kids who became mass murderers because it allowed them a new means of expressing their opinions. This takes a cue from Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson's Scream in presenting kids who are appallingly callous even before the bodies start appearing and disappearing. Matthew Lillard more or less reprises his role from the horror hit, cutting loose with hilarious and show-stopping fiendishness as a cross between Ernie Bilko and the Devil Incarnate and creating in Tim a character who might well be the 1990s version of Ben Gazzara's Jocko De Paris from End as a Man. Of the group, only the doomed Natalie displays genuine feeling, which makes her even more of a target: 'you'll make Natalie cry,' Rand is warned when he is being especially horrible to her, only for him to snap 'like that's a hard thing to do!' While it's running, the film seems like a succession of scenes that serve to illustrate the terrifying cruelty of rich kid Tim ['or maybe I'm just a psycho'] and his schoolfriend Rand, who are both given set-pieces of monstrousness: Tim in taunting a mentally-handicapped student at a party, Rand in his acidic treatment of Natalie ['I think she's the one']. Typically for a first-timer, Rosen sometimes lets his material go on too long: a parody of The Deer Hunter with the three leads playing Russian roulette with beercans while reciting dialogue from the Michael Cimino film is funny at first but carries on long after the point has been made and the laughs earned. As in Heathers - another obvious influence - all the adult characters are caricatures of authority [menacing cops, jittery psychologist, strutting campus security guard] and are easily manipulated by the killer kids. The obvious kinship between Tim and Rand, who have a rich kid history not shared by scholarship student Chris, plus that old favourite 'they haven't found the body yet' device, is too-obvious stage-setting for the revelation that the whole plot is directed against Chris, who is suggested to be afflicted by pangs of conscience that are cleverly not quite confirmed. Though the cliff-top revelations of the finale might be criticised as mechanical [an unguessable twist to cap the one you saw coming], Rosen has taken the trouble to lay the groundwork for it by never making Chris a complete innocent and by establishing the mutual contempt that has always run under the strange relationship between Rand and Tim. As in End as a Man, there is a strong suggestion of homo-erotic sadism in the often bare-chested Tim's dominance of his friends, which extends to a theatrical secution of Emma while he grins at the concealed Chris, though this sort of thematic material doesn't play as well in the out 90s as it did in the closeted 50s. Like Heathers and The Last Supper -
and, subliminally, Scream - Dead Man's Curve
spins its nastiest ironies on the subject of class in America.
The script insistently underlines the complex web of privilege and handicap
that sustains and traps its characters, from the student-hating security
guard's rant about the inflation of educational qualifications through
the fetishising of Harvard entrance requirements to the poster on Emma's
wall that declares 'You Don't Win Silver, You Lose Gold'. Natalie is
floored in a guessing game by a baseball question because 'she's Canadian
and a girl', and is similarly disqualified from birth and by temperament
for competition with both trust fund kids like Rand and Tim and conscienceless
social climbers like Chris and Emma. There is an ambiguity in that the
players the film seeks to condemn not only come out on top but get all
the best lines, though Tim's exit over the cliff does suggest that the
worst of America will always be defeated by those who aren't quite as
bad, if only because the totally monstrous will ultimately prove also
to be the most self-destructive. First Published In: Sight and Sound December 1998 Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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