Slow Burn Reviews

Any opportunity to see 1970s action icon Pam Grier up to her old tricks is welcome, even in a derivative crime picture that's not fit to kiss the hem of FOXY BROWN’s bell-bottoms. When Vera Church (Charlene Francique) is murdered by a serial killer, Detective Della Wilder (Pam Grier) suspects her ex-boyfriend, Doctor Samuel Charney (Rutger Hauer). Church's allegations of sexual misconduct placed Charney's medical practice under a microscope, and she chose to have an abortion when she got pregnant with Charney’s child, despite Charney's best efforts to stop her. Wilder, a bit of a maverick, butts heads with new Assistant DA Marlow King (Eugene Clark); he;s pressuring her to make a quick arrest, but . she thinks Church's murder is connected to a series of unsolved cases involving missing women. Wilder's partner, Harlan Lee (Romano Orzari), backs her up. Wilder realizes that the common link among the victims is that they all participated in a research study funded by Benning Labs. As Wilder interrogates the company's personnel, discovering in the process that ADA King is an old friend of Benning CEO Walker Grimes (Serge Houde), the company's Vice President of Women's Products meets an untimely end. Crime-solving makes for strange bedfellows as Wilder forms an alliance with Dr. Charney, who wants to clear his name. With Charney's medical expertise at her disposal, Wilder uncovers a conspiracy involving radiation therapy as a form of birth control. When the ten test subjects who volunteered for the original study developed cancer as a side effect, they began vanishing; only one is still alive. Old pros Grier and Hauer do their level best to enliven this stale thriller, but Terry Abrahamson's script, which seems to have been pieced together from scraps of old detective shows, lets them down time and again.