Despite being quite the inconsistent mover and shaker in the horror genre, we were just as used to Wes Craven delivering woeful misfires (Hills Have Eyes 2, Cursed) almost as much as he changed the face of horror itself. However, when it came to dabbling with the small screen, the horror heavyweight seemed to lose his touch completely, knocking out a fair few TV projects that did more than their part to chip away at Craven’s undisputed legacy. His first TV movie in 1978, Stranger In Our House, delivered a prototype swing at teen horror that saw Linda Blair go toe to with a witchy imposter who has tried to muscle in on her family to rather ropey effect. Years later (the same year he debuted Freddy coincidently), we got the silly Invitation To Hell that offered up a Satanic country club and almost twelve months later he delivered the shockingly bland Chiller that sold the director’s talent horribly short. However, you’d think that Craven would have learned his lesson, but in 1990 (a mere six years before Scream pulled the genre out of a noticable decline), he made the overwhelmingly goofy Night Visions, a pilot for a show that thankfully withered on the vine before it tarnished his legacy even more. It may not be the worst TV movie Wes made, but it doesn’t take psychic powers to realise that it’s completist-only territory…
A serial killer with the overwhelmingly unfortunate moniker of “The Spread Eagle Killer” has been plaguing the streets of LA, killing women and leaving their splayed corpses as some sort of terrible tableaux. Worse yet, the prolific murderer keeps changing up their method of murder, strangling one girl to death in a club parking lot one day, and using a completely different method to kill a hooker in her home the next and the LAPD is getting steadily more frustrated with every new death.
Surely the very definition of a frustrated cop is homicide detective Sergeant Thomas Mackey who, other than being something of an arrogant prick, is also in hot water with Captain Keller thanks to his thuggish approach to physically threatening suspects with his revolver. As punishment, he’s to be removed from the case and ordered to ride a desk for the next 10 days, but he can avoid that if he agrees to partner up with specialist in criminal psychopathology, Dr. Sarah Powers who proves to have something of a strange talent.
Not only is Sarah psychic, but her gift is so highly tuned that she starts to take on the personalities of the people she’s reading which ultimately turn out to be the Eagle’s next victims. But while this could prove to be incredibly useful, there are two major drawbacks – the first is than no one (including Mackey) believes her, but the second is that she has no way of controlling what happens when she takes on another personality. Can the mismatched team of an on-the-edge cop and a woman unable to keep hold of her own identity manage to close the legs of the Spread Eagle Killer for good?
I’ve kind of always given Craven’s TV work a pass because, for the most part he either seemed to be using them to hone his studio work or just stay busy (horror icons have to eat too, you know), however, once A Nightmare On Elm Street undeniably laid down those horror credentials, watching Wes return to the small screen often felt like having a friend keep going back to a no-good partner whom they were far too good for. Chiller is, by all accounts, awful – but while Night Visions proves to be a dumb watch, the fact that it’s wedged in his filmography between Shocker (which I adore) and the vastly underrated The People Under The Stairs makes it look like the celebrated director was going through some sort of televisual mid-life crisis.
Taken that felling even further is the fact that Night Visions (which mostly takes place during the day) is a lame, feature length pilot that sounds like it should be a Simpsons joke that hurls some unconvincing psychic activity into some of the dumbest, cliche, cop show stuff you’ve ever seen. You can’t even let Wes off the hook for playing hack, because he even co-wrote this stinker and there’s times where the writing is so bad, you’d swear that he’s taking the piss for his own amusement. For a start, the woman with psychic abilities is named Sarah Powers for fuck’s sake, which I assume means that naming her Molly Medium or Claire Voyant was too on the nose, but from here the film frequently veers towards tongue-in-cheek territory without ever actually crossing the line. During a throwaway line on a news broadcast, the anchor clearly alludes to drive-by shootings claiming the lives of sea lions and latter, after Sarah is present of the stabbing of the latest, splay-legged victim at a gym, later it’s bizarrely described on the news as an “aerobics tragedy”.
Also, are we seriously expected to take a serial killer seriously who is named the Spread Eagle Killer and leaves his poor victims legs akimbo where they lay as some odd tribute to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man – but while the concept hints at some grim, psychosexual stuff, the made-for-TV script dulls any and all harsh edges by dumbing everything down and delivering two lead characters who are less mismatched and more moronic.
For a start, James Remar’s painfully loose cannon cop is so cliche, once again you wonder if Wes is just phoning it in – but Remar attacks the role with no subtlety whatsoever, blurting out tough-guy speak like “I like being on the edge, the view’s better.” without a trace of irony whatsoever. Plus, this is one of those cop shows where our hero can happily point a loaded gun in frustration at either a suspect or an interfering colleague and only get ten days of paperwork for their indiscretion. Alternatively, Loryn Locklin’s Sarah is taken to adopting other accents and bugging her eyes out whenever her psychic powers suddenly kick in and a major plot point is the asshole Mackey having to quash his dickhead qualities to aid Powers in trying to get control of her episodes. However, when her episodes have her bug out and hold an aerobics class or think she’s a soap actress who schmoozes her way around an industry party they prove to be more of an irritant than a threat.
However, while there’s the odd nice touch (always nice to spot Shocker’s Mitch Pileggi), the fact Craven is so obviously slumming it proves to be frequently frustrating. In fact, it’s interesting to watch him utterly bungle the whodunit aspect of the film (you’ll literally guess the killer’s identity in about 10 minutes after the film starts) when Kevin Williamson’s script for Scream made him instantly a master of twist reveals only 6 years later.
Certainly not the worst of Wes Craven’s forays into television, Night Visions actually finds itself frequently stumbling into the accidently funny bracket due to how terrible it’s central concept is carried out and the bewildering awfulness of the writing which misses Craven’s usual spark. However, from here, the director would see his game improve as he delivered The People Under The Stairs, New Nightmare and, yes, Scream in rapid succession (we won’t mention Vampire In Brooklyn just yet…). Maybe Wes was just having a psychic episode himself – one where he took the identity of a far, inferior director.
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