An Occasional Hell Review by Bobby LePire. Edited by Courtney McAllister.

 

This slow burn mystery has quite the cast- Tom Berenger, Stephen Lang, Kari Wuhrer, Robert Davi, and Valeria Golino. What a waste it is, then, to have all that talent involved in something so plodding, slight, and awkward.

 

The mystery here isn’t too hard to figure out if you pay enough attention but, for all of its numerous faults, this movie is good about keeping the mystery afloat and engaging. The plot kickstarts when Lang is killed and Wuhrer winds up missing. We’re deliberately not shown the killer’s face, so there’s dramatic irony at work, and I shall not spoil any major twists or reveals here.

 

Tom Berenger plays Ernest Dewalt, former cop turned college professor of forensics. His performance vacillates wildly between very good, believable, sympathetic and strong to clearly bored out of his mind. His ennui is most noticeable throughout his scenes with Golino’s widowed Elizabeth Laughton. They share such little chemistry all of their scenes flounder, which means there is very little to invest in throughout the film. Golino, outside of her chemistry with Berenger, is only okay, doing this whisper to soft talking thing when she’s meant to be sad that’s far more silly than emotionally intense.

 

Davi is Detective Larry Abbot, head police officer on the case. The good thing is that he injects each of his too brief scenes with liveliness and vivacity, the bad thing is that the film has such energy only in spurts whenever he’s not onscreen. Stephen Lang is very good, and comes off as appropriately sleazy. And then there’s Wuhrer, with one of the absolute worst Southern accents ever committed to celluloid. Seriously, it’s an atrocious accent! However, aside from that she probably gives the most consistent and dynamic performance. She’s wild and flighty in the flashbacks as the missing waitress. While playing the hallucination plaguing/ helping Dewalt, she’s smoldering, sexy, and mysterious. Seeing her playing the dual roles is impressive.

 

As for those hallucinations, I’m not too sure that’s what they are. Dewalt can talk to and interact with them, so maybe he can see dead people, or his injury in the line of duty (thus former cop) has given him psychic abilities, or maybe this movie is very dumb and can’t apply logic to anything. It is most probably, definitely the latter. Which is, of course, the biggest fault with the movie- random things seem to happen out of nowhere for plot convenience. There’s a scene early on where Laughton sneaks into Dewalt’s class, near the end of it. Next major scene, Dewalt walks into his darkened office, where she’s just waiting in the dark for him. Her husband (Lang) worked on the same campus as Dewalt, so her knowing a quicker route (however unlikely) makes sense, but how did she get in? Why is she just in the dark? I realize this is comparatively small, but that’s the point. Our male lead meets our female lead in full blown slasher killer mode, and she’s still a romantic interest. WTF? This only happened so they could have a surprise meeting. It’s so dumb! Then the ghost (?) of Wuhrer actually tells him things he couldn’t have known before. This is most egregious at the end of the film (which I won’t spoil), which robs the movie of a climax. Just a vision, cops are called, and epilogue. Altogether it takes less than ten minutes to wrap the mystery, cure the hallucinations, and have the people that deserve it get their comeuppance.

 

As good as Robert Davi is in his fifteen minutes (maybe less) of screentime, the cops are sort of derelict of their duty. Berenger’s Dewalt is a semi-famous author, and I get that some people are more willing to open up to him than the cops, but some of the stuff he discovered well before the police (or that they only discovered because he tells them) is so simple to track down it’s migraine inducing to think about how the cops hadn’t found out about it on their own. An important piece of information about the buying of a pristine Civil War era rifle- mind you, Lang’s dead asshole is a Civil War buff- is such an obvious thing to look into, but they don’t. Why? Oh dear god, why?

 

The band Jump Little Children has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo. I have no idea what powers that be compelled them to be in this, but they do well enough, essentially playing themselves. The kicker is that they don’t even play a song! We hear a small bit of them practicing, but that’s it. Considering how little importance the fact that one of the suspects is in the band has to the plot, and the plodding pace the movie exhibits, you could excise them and their one scene entirely and have the exact same film. But, I do know that some friends of mine only know this movie because Jump Little Children are in it, so yay (?)!

 

The dumbest part of the whole film is the flashback where Dewalt’s severe injury is explained. Good on the movie for showing, as so many movies tell instead, but the flashback’s tone is a million times different from the rest of the movie. Its visual style, its cinematography, its everything is just so different that not only is it jarring, it also completely destroys any forward momentum the movie had going up to that point.

 

The movie on a technical level isn’t too bad, which makes some of the more awkward shots stand out much more. My favorite shot is when we follow Dewalt’s truck pulling up to Laughton’s house. It’s a mid-range dolly tracking shot, during which we follow the truck up a lengthy driveway, and the truck parks in front of Laughton’s house. When the truck parks, the camera stops, with the house dead center, and the screen flanked by ferns (bushes? Some sort of foliage). It’s effective and neat. But for every shot like that, there’s one that’s hard to figure its purpose. The worst offender being a close-up of Mrs. Laughton, in which her hair frames her face and the camera is tilted upward. It’s hard to describe exactly what makes this shot so, so bad, but it doesn’t work. The edit to it is sloppy, the way her hair falls in the scene seems unnatural, the tilt up doesn’t add any layers. It’s so bizarre and ghastly looking.

 

The movie is very poorly paced. The questions and answers of the murder trickle in leisurely, as if a Sunday stroll through the park is in order, not a life and death situation (which it is). And what’s around to keep us entertained throughout the slow burn? Dumb cops and a romance that doesn’t work! Seriously, the chemistry between our two leads is zilch, and that causes their scenes to fall flat.

 

There’s one choice line that I love, which showcases what this could have been if anyone bothered to properly give a damn. When discussing certain aspects of the case with Wuhrer’s visage as she chills in a tree (the ‘Alice In Wonderland’ correlation just hit me!), Dewalt says “Figments of the imagination don’t have feelings”. Sure, this explains that she’s definitely not a ghost, but not how she knows things he doesn’t. So, while I enjoy the line, it only causes more holes in the swiss cheese that is this movie’s story.

 

The mystery does a good job of keeping you guessing, the odd line here or there is pretty good, the cinematography is mostly solid, but then there’s everything else. The romance is bad, the cops are beyond incompetent, the plot is chock full of holes, and our protagonist has some not really explained supernatural abilities. Seriously, what are these hallucinations he keeps having?! But, while it is so, so very stupid and poorly paced, if you’re a big mystery aficionado, there are enough intriguing elements to make it worth a watch.