Review of A Killing Affair (1985) by Tracey C — 27 Apr 2014

The lurid title isn't much of an improvement over the name of Robert Houston's original novel ('Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday') but it at least hints at the occasionally overwrought plotting in this Appalachian thriller, a murder/hostage drama set in rural West Virginia circa 1943.

Some careful attention to period flavor helps give the film a definite sense of time and place, not that it matters after ignorant drifter Peter Weller kills a wicked mill foreman and holds his victim's long-suffering wife captive for three days.

The set-up is dramatically sound, but every shred of credibility gets tossed out the window in the second act: Kathy Baker begins to sympathize with her captor; they sleep together; he's then revealed to be a homicidal maniac, and so forth.

Perhaps it's all meant to be a parable of one woman's liberation out from under male authority, but the subtext is too confused for the film to work as anything deeper than a routine, violent psychodrama.

In the end what might have been a real sleeper winds up as just another corpse.