Jennifer Eight (1992)

Withnail and I’s helmsman Bruce Robinson wrote and directed this neglected thriller bouyed by eerily employed wintry Pacific Northwest locations and a strong cast. Andy Garcia is John Berlin, a frayed, fragged LA detective who follows his former tutor Freddy Ross (Lance Henriksen, in sterling form) and his sister (Kathy Baker), now Ross’s wife, to work in a more peaceful neck of the woods, only to immediately stumble on severed body parts which Berlin believes might portend a serial killer’s trail of carnage. He soon comes to realise that the killer is targeting blind women. He investigates the disappearance of one such lady who vanished from a nearby institute of the blind, and interviews her friend Helena (Uma Thurman, excellent in an uncommonly delicate part), a music teacher in the institute which, when emptied out for the holidays, becomes a convenient spooky locale for some well-handled stalking in the dark.

Robinson aims for an eccentric, sonorous, adult atmosphere to flesh out the standard framework, building his characters with care in some fine, intimate moments. Such scenes include that in which the socially awkward Helena is left alone at a party, her nerves giving out amidst unfamiliar voices and bustling bodies, and when Berlin seethes with mounting anger during a grilling by shark-like FBI agent St Clare (John Malkovich) as his psyche is stripped down to its crudest essentials. Robinson employs a relaxed, even languid pace, which helps build the film's strong mood but unfortunately doesn’t paper over the fact that Jennifer Eight is hamstrung by a formula story and some sizeable plot holes, as it follows set genre templates far too exactly. Bump off likeable sidekick character at end of act two? Check. Make sure villain is an easily identifiable, if utterly unlikely, supporting character? Check. Provide obvious red herrings like casting Bob Gunton as the unctuous head of the institute? Check. Some clumsily abrupt edits don’t help, and the suspense gradually ebbs amongst improbabilities and familiarities. It’s still one of the better ‘90s Hollywood pseudo-giallo flicks, sustaining tension and ambience until close to the end. It also receives a shot in the arm from the late appearance by Malkovich, eating up the scenery like a lion on an antelope. Robinson had planned for this to pay for other projects, but its commercial failure meant his disappearance from the cinema scene, an exile that finally ended with his fairly good 2011 adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diary.