False Identity Reviews

As any long-suffering film critic will tell you, most bad movies contain at least one flashback. FALSE IDENTITY begins with one. It is 1973 in San Diego, California. A young US Navy intelligence agent, Harlan Erickkson, makes the not-very-intelligent move of getting out of his car late at night on an abandoned pier and hollering the name of the person he is supposed to meet there, Driscoll. Driscoll does appear, and then some, caving in Erickkson's head with a lead pipe, bashing in his face with a plank, and finally burning off his fingerprints with acid. After changing clothes with his victim, Driscoll tries to make his getaway, only to have his car explode in a flurry of skyrockets, as if it were carrying a trunkload of fireworks. It turns out that the skullduggery at the root of this violent meeting has something to do with top-secret weaponry stolen by Driscoll. It also turns out that, amazingly, Erickkson lives, though his memory is gone, and he believes he is Driscoll. Unfortunately, so do the authorities, who throw him into prison for the next 17 years. Those thinking, at this point, that FALSE IDENTITY will be about Erickkson's efforts to see justice done by exposing the real culprits and putting his life back together are only half-right. The wrong half. In fact, what really happened on the pier that night is never very central to IDENTITY'S concerns. In time we learn that it was a gimmick calculated to give Erickkson amnesia without really giving him amnesia (bad movies lean on flashbacks; really terrible movies lean on flashbacks plus amnesia). Getting out of prison, and still thinking he's Driscoll, Erickkson (now played by Stacy Keach) heads to the fictional California town of Lexington, which also happens to be the home of the rest of the Erickkson clan. However, Erickkson heads there simply because the town gives him a funny feeling. Besides, IDENTITY would pretty much come to a grinding halt if he went to some other Lexington, say Lexington, Kentucky, or Lexington, Ohio. Actually, that wouldn't have been a half-bad idea considering what does happen. In Lexington, Harlan finds himself hip-deep in southern fried gothic weirdness magically transplanted to the West Coast. Erickkson's brother, Marshall (Tobin Bell), the head of the clan, grows oranges instead of tobacco or cotton. He also happens to be a bug-eyed psychotic bully who likes to beat up women and whose sadistic henchmen help to keep the town in his iron grip. Marshall's leading victim is his wife, Vera (Veronica Cartwright), who, quite understandably, is a babbling, neurotic alcoholic. It only makes sense, somehow, that this nest of corn-pone craziness should also include a dippy radio deejay (Genevieve Bujold), a transplanted French-Canadian who calls herself Coyote on the air and Rochelle Roux in "real life." Her investigations into Erickkson's life, part of her radio series on local heroes, trigger the amnesiac's memories, cause Vera to switch from vodka to coffee as her morning beverage of choice, and, most important, turn Marshall red with sputtering rage, leading him to order his henchmen to bump off what seems to be half the town's population. If you haven't already guessed--or if you've never read any Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner--this is a family hiding a terrible secret. And Erickkson's return, along with Rochelle's radio show, threatens to blow the lid off. Unfortunately, the only ones still sputtering with rage at the end of this film are those who've sat through it. Besides being resolutely unoriginal, Sandra K. Bailey's script is also slow-moving, convoluted, and smothered in talk, much of it so embarrassing that the actors, at times, seem visibly confounded by some of the things the script forces them to say with straight faces. The direction by James Keach (Stacy's brother) is awash in TV-style clunkiness further burdened by an apparent attempt to include as much footage as possible of Stacy riding around town on his Harley-Davidson. The only compensation offered by this misguided effort is Bernard Auroux's cinematography, which gives the film a style and moodiness it never deserves. The title, at least, has a backhanded kind of honesty to it. FALSE IDENTITY tries to palm itself off as a suspense drama. In reality, it's a big snooze. (Violence, profanity, adult situations.)