Never Talk to Strangers

Never Talk to Strangers is a Brian DePalma film without the benefit of Brian DePalma. Coming from the ridiculously talented founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Peter Hall, this “psychological murder mystery” starts out awful and goes downhill from there, piling on the obvious like so many dead bodies and battering its audience about the face and neck with needless exposition and glaringly silly flashbacks. De Mornay plays psychologist Sarah Taylor, an impulsive criminologist with a shadowy past. When she takes up with a mysterious, leather-jacketed stranger by the name of Tony Ramirez (Banderas), strange things begin to happen. Dead roses fill her mailbox, her cat is killed and then sent back to her C.O.D., and strange figures dance on the periphery of her life. Is Tony some sort of homicidal nutcase? Or could it be her overly possessive neighbor Cliff (Miller)? Or even her estranged father (Cariou), who's just returned from a long absence. Or none of the above? With films like this, there's really not much to give away, but I'll keep my mouth shut, just in case. Suffice to say, both the who and the why of this sophomoric exercise in non-restraint are almost immediately obvious, making the rest of the film barely watchable. There are, of course, plenty of shots of Banderas and De Mornay getting naked, but even a little T&A fails to make this mess any more interesting than a broken toaster-oven. Hall, for his part, can't seem to keep the camera still and frequently descends into long, agonizing bouts of slow-motion drivel that culminates with a gooey snowball fight that left me feeling downright ill. Utterly forgettable, Never Talk to Strangers may be the first black mark on director Hall's permanent record. Let's hope it's the last.