A Killing Affair is one of those rare movies that, in their failure, avoid being interesting or noble or even laughable. It’s just plain bad.
Deep in the woods of the Appalachians in 1943, a man is killed. His wife, unaware of her husband’s sudden departure, sends her two children off to town and returns to her isolated house. First, she discovers the dead husband, hanging around in the smokehouse. Then, she discovers a strange man, obviously the killer, hanging around inside the house.
During the next couple of days, the wife and killer threaten each other, fight, bury the husband’s corpse, make love. In the course of this, a great deal of backwoods hooey is unearthed.
This movie is chockful of crude caricaturing. The mean husband, a philanderer, a cruel boss, and a man who kicks his children’s guitar, does everything but twirl his oily mustache (he’d do it if he had one).
There are scenes that suggest that writer-director David Saperstein might be attempting some irony, such as the moment when the wife turns to the stranger during the backyard burial and says, “I’m sorry about your family” (in a long flashback sequence that brings the movie to a grinding halt, the stranger has described the ax murders of his wife and children). Picking up on that, the stranger looks at the wife after they have made love and sighs, “You do help mah grievin’.”
Unfortunately, the rest of the film is rendered in a hushed, straight-faced delivery, so the humor appears unintentional. Elsewhere, Saperstein displays his light touch by throwing in huge close-ups of important plot gimmicks, in case you missed that knife being secreted behind the bedpost.
The worst thing about Saperstein’s uncertainty with the material is that he leaves some decent actors adrift. Among the lost of Bill Smitrovich, a good character actor stuck doing the Snidely Whiplash routine as the husband, and primo sleaze John Glover, who plays the wife’s brother, a country preacher.
Worse off are Peter Weller, as the killer, and Kathy Baker, as the wife. Weller, who played Robocop, at least tries to fashion a performance here, even if it is all googly eyes and mannered drawl. Kathy Baker, a respected stage actress who won well-deserved raves for her prostitute in last year’s Street Smart, is actively bad. Baker has interesting screen presence – from one angle she’s homely, from one angle she’s beautiful – but she doesn’t seem to have any clue about what’s going on in this movie.
I don’t blame her. Bad actors can give bad performances on their own, but good actors give bad performances because a director isn’t doing his job. In A Killing Affair, blame the director.
First published in The Herald, July 29, 1988
Saperstein wrote Cocoon. This was actually Kathy Baker’s second film, with an official release date of 1985.