Never Talk to Strangers Movie Trailer. If you’re a film maker who has been handed a mediocre script and Antonio Banderas (not an odd situation these days), you might as well make the most of it. And for a while “Never Talk to Strangers” has fun with role reversal.
Mr. Banderas, as a pony-tailed, leather-jacketed mystery man named Tony, plays the film’s sex object opposite Rebecca De Mornay’s uptight psychiatrist, Sarah. He picks her up in a liquor store, impressing her with his knowledge of fine wine. Soon they are in his funky loft, where Tony does all the things women usually do in sex-and-suspense movies.
He is the one who quickly pulls off his shirt during their first romantic encounter; he is the one who jumps into the shower, distraught after his lover stomps out the door; he is the one whose feelings are easily hurt. Well, why not? There are worse things in movie land than treating Antonio Banderas as a brunette bimbo.
But “Never Talk to Strangers” isn’t clever enough to sustain even that little bit of playfulness. This is a “Fatal Attraction” and “Jagged Edge” wannabe in which Sarah is handed a dreadfully overwrought life.
When she gets dead flowers at her door and finds booby traps in her apartment, the list of suspects is almost infinite. To begin with, one of her patients is a serial rapist-murderer (Harry Dean Stanton). There is the father (Len Cariou) she fears for easily guessed reasons. There is Dennis Miller as a neighbor who wants to be more than a friend. Sarah even has a fiance in her past who vanished without leaving so much as a note. In that crowd, Tony is almost automatically ruled out as too obvious a villain.
For a film like this to work, it has to be sleek and unpredictable. “Never Talk to Strangers” is not aggressively bad, just slack and unsurprising. It doesn’t have a boiled bunny as in “Fatal Attraction”; it has a murdered cat instead.
Peter Hall, the estimable English stage director, is obviously more at home with Shakespeare than with this material. At various times each of the men is photographed in devilish shadows, and Tony lives conveniently near an amusement park, so Sarah can walk through a field of lurid neon on her way home.
Eventually the story arrives at an idiotic ending. Mr. Banderas walks through it all looking good, though he and Ms. De Mornay are far more convincing when they are having sex than when they are having conversations.
“Never Talk to Strangers” opened yesterday without advance screenings. It’s an easy-to-watch movie that will be even easier on video, where it should turn up any minute.
Never Talk to Strangers (1995)
Directed by: Peter Hall
Starring: Rebecca De Mornay, Antonio Banderas, Dennis Miller, Len Cariou, Harry Dean Stanton, Emma Corosky, Eugene Lipinski, Martha Burns, Beau Starr, Tim Kelleher
Screenplay by: Lewis Green, Jordan Rush
Production Design by: Linda Del Rosario, Richard Paris
Cinematography by: Elemér Ragályi
Film Editing by: Roberto Silvi
Costume Design by: Terry Dresbach
Set Decoration by: Richard Paris
Music by: Pino Donaggio, Steve Sexton
MPAA Rating: R for violence, language and some strong graphic sexuality.
Distributed by: TriStar Pictures
Release Date: October 20, 1995
Hits: 273
