Tall, Dark and Deadly Reviews

Another imperiled career gal pays for her unladylike urges in yet another genre piece aimed at saltpetering swinging singles in the dating game. When deranged police detective Roy Calvin (Jack Scalia) drops off a date, he sometimes does so literally--right out of a high-rise window to her death. Trying to get over unresolved feelings for her ex-boyfriend Sam (Todd Allen), account exec Maggie (Kim Delaney) meets Roy at a bar and plunges recklessly into an affair with him, not knowing that he's a homicide cop. Embroiled in an office power struggle with Toni (Ely Pouget) who pilfers her creative ideas, Maggie is vulnerable to Roy's attentiveness. When independent Maggie peeves Roy by putting the brakes on their affair, Roy proves his serious intentions by killing Toni with a knife from Maggie's kitchen, which he uses to blackmail her. Roy chains Maggie to a sink; she escapes and runs to the police--only to discover Roy's real job. She escapes to Sam's house in Mobile, while Roy murders her friend Gloria (Gina Mastrogiacomo). On the eve of surrendering to the FBI, Maggie is attacked by Roy outside Sam's house. Wounded in a knife scuffle with Sam, Roy survives to choke an investigating cop to death and to nearly corner the fleeing couple in their car at a ferry. When Roy confronts Sam and Maggie at a boatyard, his foot slips into a winch-rope, enabling Maggie to crush him to death with a boat. TV-movie fans never seem to tire of seeing attractive businesswomen put in their place for acting on the same desires that men are praised for indulging. Even if a heroine calls what's she's doing romance, she's doomed to run the screenwriter's gauntlet because you don't dump a steadfast live-in companion for a rascal right out of a Calvin Klein ad without paying the Puritanical piper. In these dangerous liaison flicks, indiscretion is punished not merely by near-death scrapes but by incredible guilt since many of the heroine's loved ones get mowed down because of what she did for love. This banquet of psychosexual cliches benefits from swaggering Scalia, who has confronted the afterlife of matinee "idol-dom" by excelling at suave villain roles in his middle age. Complemented by Delaney who manages to look daisy-fresh even when frazzled, Scalia keeps the genre gears grinding right through his over-the-top comeuppance at the climax. Drably written and conventionally directed, TALL, DARK AND DEADLY resembles a neurotic minuteman warning us about picking up strangers in bars as he rides through a sex club. (Violence, profanity, sexual situations.)