Sun 11 Nov 2018
Movie Review: A CLIMATE FOR KILLING (1991).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[7] Comments
A CLIMATE FOR KILLING. Black Crow Productions / Propaganda Films, 1991. John Beck, Katharine Ross, Steven Bauer, Mia Sara, Phil Brock. Written and directed by J. S. Cardone.
I led a sheltered life through the 1990s. Before watching this movie, at the heart of which is a better-than-average murder mystery, I’d heard of only one of the members of the cast. Check the listing above, and you can probably tell which one that was. But between them all, they probably appeared in well over a hundred movies, many of them like this one, most of them without a lot of pretensions and with budgets, shall we say, on the skimpy side.
The story. Found in the desert in Yuma County, Arizona, is the body of decapitated woman. Her hands have been removed as well, making it difficult if not impossible to identify her. Luckily Grace Hines, the local coroner (played by Katharine Ross), recognizes the birthmark on her thigh. Unluckily she can tell no one but Paul McCraw of the sheriff’s office (John Beck) since she saw the mark while performing an illegal abortion on the woman many years before.
Which gets us to the core of the matter. Now the problem is the fact that the woman was presumed dead 15 years before. She was presumed murdered by her much older husband, who committed suicide later the same week in a fit of remorse. Written out like this, I think you may be able to put two and two together and get close to four faster than the investigators on the case manage to do, but it’s still an interesting challenge.
Filling out the running time, though, is a subplot that arises when a young investigator (Steven Bauer) arrives at sheriff’s office tasked by a government office in Phoenix to “modernize” their operations there. Problem is that he’s a “by the books” kind of guy, and McCraw likes to work on “instinct.” Matters get even more complicated when the new guy starts taking out McCraw’s daughter.
This part of the story is filler at best, but it does add another dimension to it. I watched the movie last week, but I recorded it from Cinemax on a VHS tape some 25 years ago. It has the ambience and basic ingredients of a made-for-TV movie, but it turns out it was not, as evidenced by a topless dancer in a local bar in one scene, and one rather graphic sex scene toward the end of the movie. Both gratuitous? Yes, of course they are.
November 11th, 2018 at 7:46 pm
Some made for television films had X or European cuts with nudity and greater violence and bad language so it is hard to tell what was meant for television and not, though this one sounds as if it was aimed at the World market more than American theaters.
November 11th, 2018 at 7:54 pm
Cinemax showed sex-and-violence thrillers like this by the carload in that era. They always seemed to come on at Late Show times, maybe 11PM. There were so many films like this on Cinemax that people made jokes about them. Critic Andrew Sarris complained about the “nightmares” clogging up his cable TV.
I have no idea how these films were made. Did Cinemax finance them? Were they made for the Foreign Market? Or both? None of them every seemed to show up at the local multiplex. I never read an article that detailed the inside story.
Nostalgia! (of sorts).
November 11th, 2018 at 7:58 pm
Looking on IMDb just now (and I should have earlier) it was a straight-to-video release. It might have played in a very few theaters in this country but probably not.
And of course Cinemax eventually picked it up. Movies like this one were a big reason for having Cinemax back then.
November 11th, 2018 at 8:03 pm
I only watched a few such movies. One I liked:
Body Shot (Dmitri Logothetis, 1993)
This had Robert Patrick giving a good performance. He was good recently in the TV series Scorpion.
November 11th, 2018 at 8:16 pm
Many of the crime films like BODY SHOT were what I considered noir films, often with sexy scenes added, but still noir. I don’t know if any blog specializes in reviewing these, but I think somebody ought to.
November 11th, 2018 at 11:27 pm
Many of these did good money in places like Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as well as various other foreign venues where they played in theaters.
November 12th, 2018 at 12:00 pm
About those Cinemax flicks: Too often I never could tell which came first, the sex scenes to which an obligatory plot had to be added or vice versa. As for this movie, they just might have accidentally stumbled into, as you say, “a better-than-average murder mystery.” Others might not agree, but I think a sex scene, in book or film, delays and diffuses the plot’s development like nothing else can.