RETROSPECTIVE: LADY BEWARE (1987)
by Chris Webb copyright 1997
Cast: Diane Lane (Katya Yarno), Michael Woods (Jack Price), Cotter Smith (Mac Odell). Directed by Karen Arthur Written by Charles Zev Cohen and Susan Miller
How do movies like this get made?! They should have called it "Everyone Beware."
This is a TV movie which became a feature film, and worked its way into a string of movies on a video tape that my family owns. So, after watching FATAL ATTRACTION and MOONSTRUCK, I decided to explore this so-called thriller.
Its MANNEQUIN: The Dark Side, as Diane Lane runs from a psychopath who has intercepted her mail. This is how he knows all about her life. Her name is Katya Yarno and she creates window dressings with mannequins for artistic purposes. She has quite the mouth, but that impresses the mayor who commissions her work. A newspaper sends Mac Odell (Smith) to cover her work, and they fall in love almost instantaneously.
This is when Jack Price (Woods) begins his stalking. We listen to his eerie phone calls and then become even more frightened once we see him in her apartment. His presence is not as scary however, as his dancing in a towel after he has bathed in her tub. He then lies naked on her bed, but director Karen Arthur decides to cut that scene short. Jack is as witty and catchy as a rock. He talks about how he'll climb a beanstalk to get to her and about how nimble and quick he is. I'm sure he used other nursery rhymes to scare her as well.
Karen Arthur is a veteran of TV movies and she shows it here. It fits within a low-grade movie frame that you might watch on a Friday night. Except film allows her to explore nudity and profanity. The writers, Charles Zev Cohen and Susan Miller, must have really received backlash from this movie, because they have never written anything for any screen since. Ladd, at least, has escaped this debacle with JUDGE DREDD and THE FULL MONTY. Hopefully, she has been able to forget this movie more than I will be able to.
LADY BEWARE turns the tables once Katya decides to go after Jack, putting her life more in peril. This movie is predictable, boring, and not scary at all. It plods and we snooze. One side note, this was filmed in Pittsburgh, and it gave two of Mr. Rogers' actors, Don Brockett and Audrey Roth, some big screen time. That's perhaps the one nice thing about LADY BEWARE.
My grade: F
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews