Where Sleeping Dogs Lie Reviews

This horror genre variation on BARTON FINK is not a great film, but it is a brave one, on two counts; WHERE SLEEPING DOGS LIE is both a serial killer drama devoid of gore, and a Sharon Stone vehicle without any nudity. Nobody in Hollywood will buy the high-minded novels and "message" screenplays of penniless writer Bruce Simmons (Dylan McDermott). "Feeling, morals, all that sweet-smelling shit went out with a bullet and the two Kennedys," sneers his ex-lover Serena Black (Stone), now a glamorous literary agent. Bruce has a failed second career selling real estate, and when the would-be author gets evicted from his apartment he moves into a dilapidated old mansion he's supposed to put on the market. Bruce learns why no one will buy the place--it was the site of grisly, unsolved slayings eight years earlier. After initial revulsion, he gets a brainstorm, races to his old typewriter, and starts pounding out "Diary of a Murderer," a first-person account based on his fevered impressions and research into the case. Serena declares the manuscript-in-progress a blockbuster and sells it as a non-fiction interview with the unknown maniac. About this time Bruce takes in a boarder at the mansion, a twitchy, timid soul named Eddie (Tom Sizemore) who quotes Shakespeare and bloodier bits of the Bible, ties himself to the bed at night, and keeps under control with medication. Before long he's helping Bruce work on the book, and before much longer it becomes apparent that Eddie is the long-sought serial murderer, returned to his old killing ground. He's not even upset when Bruce discovers his secret, because now they can collaborate openly on the gruesome memoir. But while Eddie takes charge of the writing, Bruce sinks into a guilty, alcoholic funk. When Eddie states where he hid the bodies of his victims, Bruce finally calls the police, who dig up the yard, discover no bones, and dismiss the now vanished Eddie as a hoaxer. Bruce gets a last letter from his former housemate, now primed to begin a fresh killing spree. One has to wonder whether director Charles Finch (son of actor Peter Finch, working with a script co-authored by his father's widow, Yolande Turner) let autobiographical elements creep into WHERE SLEEPING DOGS LIE. This wordy, pretentious material seems to be exactly what the fictional Bruce Simmons can't sell, full of Big Ideas and characters who orate in an exaggerated manner best suited to the stage. In any case, the filmmaker makes a cameo appearance as a sour Hollywood executive who rejects Simmons' latest script. The small cast yields mixed results. Sharon Stone is ill-served by her caricatured assignment as an ermine-clad harpy with a rich vocabulary of profanities and cynical epigrams. ("It's all a compromise, Bruce...To win we have to lose our way.") In a difficult leading role, Dylan McDermott looks more like a rugged athlete than an obsessed aesthete, but he has his moments, especially when playing off Tom Sizemore's Eddie. Sizemore (WATCH IT) is terrific as the elusive murderer, visibly growing in strength and assertiveness from the moment he first appears as a bespectacled shy guy to his later dominance over Bruce. There's a homoerotic tension between the two men early on, but Finch has loftier concerns than matters of the flesh. Eddie is more of an abstract notion than a living being, with dubious, philosophical mumbo-jumbo as a motive for his atrocities; he sees himself as "the Angel of Sorrow," on a holy mission to inflict agony and annihilation on happy families whom he perceives as not having suffered their share of life's woe. Assuring Bruce that he preys on the same sheeplike bourgeoisie who make it impossible for the writer to sell serious scripts, Eddie describes how he moves undetected from place to place, carefully selecting, studying, and finishing off his victims. In place of the expected gory violence, this $1.8 million production offers atmospheric interiors and urgently gothic music. The most explicit moment (apart from the taped screams that Eddie keeps as a memento in his Walkman) is a truly chilling scene when Bruce, flinging furniture and debris away from the walls of his new home, discovers that the room was once literally painted in blood. (Profanity, adult situations, substance abuse.)