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MOVIE REVIEW
Dangerously Close (1986)
FILM: 'DANGEROUSLY CLOSE,' BY PYUN
By Nina Darnton
Published: May 9, 1986

 

VISTA Verde High School is your typical southern California suburban public school. It's got rich kids, poor kids, rebels and troublemakers. It's also got a clean-cut squad of activists, called the Sentinels, who want to tidy it up. They begin by scrubbing the graffiti off the walls, but their extracurricular activities don't stop there. Dizzy with their own sense of virtue they try - by somewhat radical means - to persuade some of their classmates to tow the Sentinel line. They carry knives and guns and dress up in black hoods and leather face masks to terrorize and torture their fellow students. This leads to absenteeism and a high dropout rate at Vista Verde High. But since the few adults shown are either hopelessly inept, indifferent or psychotic, it takes a long time for anyone to notice.

The Sentinels are the subject of ''Dangerously Close,'' the third film by the young director Albert Pyun, which opens today at the U.A. Twin and other theaters. The farfetched suspense thriller about a vigilante organization that runs amok doesn't deal with any significant themes -although it does establish a link between cleanliness and fascism.

The Sentinels chase victims through marshes, string them up by their feet and shoot them in the head with paint guns. But this good clean fun gets out of hand when some of the victims actually get killed. The question is, who is the murderer? One of the problems with this part of California, at least in this film, is there never seems to be a cop around when you need one.

In fact, the lack of responsible adults in this movie is its most interesting aspect. Shooting parts of the film like an MTV video, with flash forwards, odd camera angles and long shots and using a driving loud score, the director creates a completely adolescent world where adults either don't matter or exert malevolent influences. It's a curious world view, and it makes the film both unrealistic and ungrounded - as if the viewers were lost somewhere in the id of the unbalanced adolescent main character, Randy (John Stockwell).

Mr. Stockwell is appropriately chilling as Randy, and Bradford Bancroft (Krooger) is endearing as the rebel with a Mohawk haircut who is the only character who knows a Nazi when he sees one. But unfortunately, the adolescent world created within the film extends to its conception. Teen-Age Fascists

 

DANGEROUSLY CLOSE, directed by Albert Pyun; screenplay by Scott Fields, John Stockwell and Marty Ross (based on a story by Mr. Ross); director of photography, Walt Lloyd; edited by Dennis O'Connor; music by Michael McCarty; produced by Harold Sobel; released by Cannon Films. At U.A. Twin, Broadway at 49th Street, Gemini, Second Avenue at 64th Street, and other theaters.

 

Running time: 95 minutes. This film is rated R.

Randy-John Stockwell, Donny J.- Eddie Peck, Julie-Carey Lowell, Krooger-Bradford Bancroft.