Writer/director Ron Oliver's thriller doesn't break any new ground but it's diverting if ultimately forgettable entertainment. Shannon Tweed stars as the mother of a 16 year old boy who has been traumatised by the accidental death of his father, a stuntman who failed to survive a jump over Niagara Falls. Oliver gives us a witty editing cut from the boy screaming to a car alarm, which clues you that this isn't going to be a deep psychological drama. I also liked a psychiatrist's comment to Tweed's concern over her son being institutionalised - "We've paved over the snake pits"- and one scene where it is the psychiatrist who rests on a couch while the boy talks. Since we are told that the father was beheaded in the fall, that may explain the son's collection of doll's heads which he keeps in a fish tank. When truckie David Keith marries Tweed, their wedding cake amusingly made in the shape of a truck, and then Joseph Bottoms appears as Keith's brother, the signs indicate more trouble is ahead, especially since Keith sports a ponytail and Bottoms an earring. The boy begins to have visions of a woman in a red car, and you can bet that she leads him back to the Falls. As the boy Nicholas Shields is all big eyes, but his sheepishness in reaction to Bottoms' attempt at seduction is funny, and Oliver times our sight of Bottoms in his face pack superbly. Oliver encourages Bottoms, Kathleen Robertson as a girl who befriends Shields, and Christopher Plummer doing a parody of Peter Falk's detective, to overplay, and he even gets a reasonable performance out of Tweed, who for once isn't used as a sexpot. She has a scene where Bottoms torments her with a duck glove puppet that is more comic than serious. The setting of the climax in a Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Murders has delicious potential but by then we've been exhausted by an extended chase where the outcome has to come to be disappointingly inevitable. The plot features a point about a large amount of money, the origin of which is never made clear or rational by the end, and gives the coda an unfunny laugh line, spoken by the character in a totally out of character way. Mention is made of the lovely theme music by Paul J Zaza.
Review of Liar's Edge
