Caroline at Midnight Reviews

An underwhelming erotic film noir sent straight to home video via Roger Corman's production company, CAROLINE AT MIDNIGHT has little to distinguish it except an unrelievedly somber tone, imparted by second-tier actors taking the slight storyline too seriously. The eponymous Caroline was a long-lost amour of crusading crime reporter Jack Lynch (Clayton Rohner). He gets a phone message summoning him to her new residence--only to find it's a cemetery. The caller, a friend of the now-deceased Caroline, is Victoria Dillon (Mia Sara), lovely wife of murderously corrupt LAPD Detective Ray Dillon (Tim Daly). She charges that Ray killed free-spirited Caroline at the end of their torrid affair, and turns to Jack for help. Before you can say "erotic thriller," the newshound and the married lady are lovers. Jack regularly assists Internal Affairs in trying to clean up the force, and with info from Victoria he has Ray busted for drug-dealing. But the dastardly flatfoot escapes custody and menaces the protagonists in an operatic showdown that ends in Victoria's apparent death. Jack figures out, however, that the cunning Victoria herself knocked off Caroline in a jealous rage, then latched onto the journalist as a fall guy, covering her tracks, faking her own demise, and absconding with the drug cash. Jack's reunion with the femme fatale in the Florida Keys does not, for once, lead to tonguing and groping; he's brought the police. Rohner, who looks like Tim Robbins on a bad hair day, is a longtime toiler in the B-movie fields as a male lead and serves as associate producer here, wrangling a handful of familiar performers--Judd Nelson, Zach Galligan, Virginia Madsen, Paul Le Mat, Thomas F. Wilson--to add a veneer of professionalism, if not class. Priority goes to steamy sex, with the limber Mia Sara abetted by the late Caroline and a nameless "dream lover" in Jack's flashback/fantasies. Ray's junkie den of bare-breasted beauties, meanwhile, bundles together sexploitation with the ever-popular "say no to drugs" theme. (Violence, nudity, sexual situations, profanity, substance abuse, adult situations.)