I sat down this morning and turned to HBO, just to see what was on, and a Molly Ringwald movie called "Requiem For A Murder" was up next. "Dear God," I thought, "when was the last time I watched a movie with Molly Ringwald in it? I know there was that 'erotic thriller' that she did several years ago that was so god awful I couldn't make my way through it. So, when was the last time I actually watched a movie with her in it? I think it was the Pick-Up Artist. That was a long time ago. I wonder.." (In fact, the Pick-Up Artist was 1987, and I saw it in the theaters, 13 years ago. ((I'm horrified by how old I have become.)) But, as IMDB reminded me, I saw Molly in the miniseries The Stand back in in 1994 where she was so bad as to be completely unmemorable.)
(And this is how aliens from another planet get you to watch their movies. They cast actors or actresses that you used to have a crush on, long after you assumed that they had married a doctor, had a couple of kids and belonged to a nice country club somewhere. In my defense, I should say that my crush on Molly Ringwald lasted exactly one movie; The Tempest. Oog.)
Anyway, I suppose you're wondering what a movie from another planet is like. And what, for that matter, is this other planet like? Does it resemble ours in any way?
In many ways, yes. This planet seems very much like present-day Earth, like one of our North American continents. For example, if you tried to pretend that Montreal was Pittsburgh, you might come up with a city like the city in this movie.
But in many, many ways, this planet is very different for ours. For example, on this planet, Molly Ringwald is the hostess of a classical music radio station every night from 8:00 p.m. to midnight. But, unlike Earth, where such a radio station would be near the bottom of the ratings in a major metropolitan area, Molly's show is the second highest-rated show in the area. This movie concerns a killer who is fixated on Molly and kills his victims with poisoned wine. While listening to classical music, no less. Detective Lou Heinz quickly realizes that it's no accident that there's always a radio at the murder scene set to the classical station, and that the murders occurred while Molly was broadcasting.
Another way that the moviemaker's planet is different from ours is that, on their world, Molly Ringwald is the most dauntingly beautiful woman ever to walk and mangle a line. Every male in this movie is fixated on her, and every male in this movie is presented as either oily or creepy, except Det. Heinz, who actually manages to come off as both. The DJ who follows Molly's shift is obsessed with her, the creepily surly engineer is obsessed with her, the monomaniacal music teacher that Molly interviews and then dates tries to force himself upon her because, of course, he's obsessed with her. And then there's Heinz, who's questioning about the case rapidly turns into smarmy haranguing. "That's your date, huh?" He says, at one point. "I don't think this is an appropriate time for you to get involved." At some points, Molly did indeed look very pretty, in the sad way that you see a past crush and realize that while pretty, her best days are behind her. In fact, Ms. Ringwald strongly resembles Monica Lewisnky, if Ms. Lewinsky had bobbed red hair; they both are attractive women with healthy round figures, and they both have a way of banishing their prettiness when they open their mouths.
Of course, Heinz and Molly have that "opposites attract" thing going on, as she's a fan of classical music unable to pronounce most of the composer's names and somehow unfamiliar with the libertine habits of Lizst, her favorite composer, and he's a fan of rock bands but can also identify any classical piece from just a few bars. Another way the filmmaker's planet is different from ours; when Molly goes to find Heinz at a rock band playing a club, rocking out, to a tune so innocuous you expect the Counting Crows to be covering it, is the most extreme audience possible--biker chicks, mohawked punks, hippies, glam girls in latex tube tops--all merrily shaking their groove things or bobbing their head.
As Heinz spends more and more time protecting Molly from a killer who's M.O. is to kill everyone but her, our filmmaking friends from Another Place go about making larger and larger leaps of logic. For someone who's romantically interested in a woman he's supposed to protect, you'd think it'd be in Heinz's best interest (for either reason) to give Molly the phone number to his cell phone. But he never does.
Somehow those mysterious extraterrestrials never play to their alternate planet's strengths. For a movie that revolves around a killer that kills to Mozart, very little interesting classical music gets played at all. How wonderful it would have been to have seen some great murders set to Don Giovanni, or the Requiem. Or bring in some of the great strange masters of classical music. Play up the elitist angle of the movie; this is, after all, a movie that has the charming conceit of a police detective who was a child prodigy (the one part of the script that I thought was cool, although, as is typical of cool elements in beginners' scripts, it was an unnecessary cool element). Make the killer a brilliant obsessive, killing people in an order that the first letters of their first names are the first six notes of an obscure Mozart piece; make Molly quote Goethe in the original German (a scene where she identifies a quote from Thomas Moore is charmingly unlikely). If nothing else, they should have made Molly the ex-child prodigy. The noir sadness suggested by an ex-child prodigy turned police detective is the kind of thing that Molly Ringwald, arguably the least talented actress ever to grace the cover of Time who now appears in dinky alien movies, could, if not own, at least give the audience an extra layer of emotional connection.
But overall, Requiem for A Murder is one of those movies that creates suspense by making you guess whether every character is the killer or merely a bad actor. In fact, most of one's critical faculties are spent not trying to guess the identity of the killer, but trying to guess who is a bad actor and who is merely doing a bad job of acting. Christopher Heyerdahl, for example, as Det. Lou Heinz kind of looks like the love child of Roy Scheider and Keith Carradine and has a certain sort of facility with his lines that makes me think that he was just in need of a good director, whereas the woman playing his partner (Lynne Adams or Ellen David, I think) was so godawful I suspected that she was married to one of the producers. As for Douglas Jackson, the director, he had one or two clever ways with filming the crime scenes that made me think he had some chops, but as the movie went on, he cribbed more and more of his moves from NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Streets.
Despite the comforting idea that creatures from another planet visit Earth only because they want to make movies with Molly Ringwald in them, Requiem For A Murder has little going for it, and should either be avoided or remade.