• Produced, written and directed by Nico Mastorakis
• Starring
  • Jeff Lester
  • Adrienne Sachs
  • Marc Singer
  • Brian Thompson
  • Shannon Tweed

Whoever coined that hoary old aphorism, “Well begun is half-done,” did the world an injustice. As true as it may be, it’s only a half-true, and the other half needs to be trumpeted loudly to the world:

“Half-done doesn’t cut the mustard, Lucille!”

In the Cold of the Night has an intriguing first act. It then squanders that promising beginning as it spirals down into meaningless nonsense and stupidity, accompanied by more supposedly-sensual sax solos that you’d find in a shelf-full of Playboy videos.

That would be so annoying to sleep on.

Scott Bruin (Jeff Lester) is a California fashion photographer, which means he spends his days photographing bikini models. (And since this is 1989, there’s a lot of neon, laserlighting, and chrome involved in the photoshoots.) He also get to have casual sex with models like Lena (Shannon Tweed) on an internally-lit waterbed. All he needs is a lifetime supply of Mountain Dew and he’d have heaven on earth.

Except that on the night he beds Lena, he has a bizarre nightmare: He wanders through an expensive house until he finds a brunette in the shower and strangles her. and to top it off, the dream continues after he wakes up, until he suddenly realizes that he’s strangling Lena. He stops before he kills her (and in fact, she kinda likes it), but there’s no more sleep for him that night.

After talking it over with his wisecracking, weightlifting friend Phil (Brian Thompson), he has a second dream the next night — same house, same girl, but this time he stabs her in her bed.

All this, and he gets paid for it too.

Thus, the next day he does exactly what any reasonable person would do: He starts exploring the newspaper microfiche at the library to see if his dreams mirror any real-life cases. (Because there are so many cases in which someone kills the same person twice, you know.) Finding nothing there, he visits a psychiatrist (David Soul!), who finds no evidence of misogynist traumas or whatnot. Scott the confides his own suspicions to Phil — that maybe he’s picking up the thoughts of a killer. Phil treats the idea with much less derision than it deserves, actually, and even agrees to stay the night to watch over Scott as he sleeps. Naturally, there are no nightmares that night.

However, the next day he’s doing a shoot in the studio with a quartet of bikinied beauties (linger, linger — gotta up the eye-candy quotient for those who are having trouble following the plot this far) — and suddenly he starts seeing the dream house through his viewfinder. It doesn’t go away when he shakes his head, either; he watches as he walks out of the house and sees the same woman, beckoning from the pool.

Needless to say, he goes apeshit at this point. And the mild relaxant the psych prescribes for him doesn’t help much, as that night he dreams he’s back in the pool, drowning the woman. Simply for safety in numbers, he goes out and sleeps the rest of the night on a park bench beside some bums, then orders everyone pizza the next morning. (Hey, at least it’s not a cliche, right?)

“Wait! I need someone to scrub my back!”

But while he’s munching and belching with his homeless buddy, he catches sight of a cyclist’s handpainted T-shirt: it’s the dream girl! (Or at least, it’s supposed to be the dream girl — I didn’t see much resemblance.) Through the biker, he tracks the T-shirt back to its painter (John Beck), who disclaims any knowledge of a specific woman inspiring the image. (Although, after Scott leaves the T-shirt shop, we see — a shirt with Scott’s face on it!)

For some reason, Scott feels comfortable enough with himself to invite Lena back over for another night of acrobatics, and everything’s copacetic until after she leaves in the morning; then he dreams he catches the woman in her bed and strangles her. He’s awakened by the doorbell, and rushes to it, clad only in a town to find –

– the dream girl (Adrienne Sachs) is standing on his front porch.

Okay, we’ve just gotten twenty or so minutes into the movie. We’ve had some intriguing events going on, mostly unexplained, but that’s okay; it’s a mystery, so nothing should be falling into place this early. Obviously, the most likely explanation up until now has been that Scott is crazy, but then She shows up in the flesh. Things should take a turn for the more mysterious.

Does anyone honestly find “finger-licking” scenes to be sexy in real life?

Instead, things take a turn for the stupid. Her name is Kimberly, and she thinks he’s a private investigator sent by her ex, but he shows her he’s a photographer, and they go to lunch with her mother, and then she invites him back to the very familiar house she’s house-sitting, and they, like get to know each other a bit, although she’s very myterious about her past. They have a “sexy-food” scene that’s probably supposed to be like the one in 9½ Weeks, but ends up being more reminiscent of the parody version in Hot Shots. They have lots of hot monkey sex (and apparently they have even more of it in the unrated version), and he keeps having flashes of his dreams (they have sex in the shower, he finds the stabbing knife in a kitchen drawer) and dreaming about killing her. And on and on and on…

And none of this actually leads anywhere. There’s no build-up from scene to scene, no reason that one event leads into another, no sense that the mystery is deepening or that Scott is getting more frustrated. Just a whole bunch of vaguely mysterious stuff thrown at the screen, and very little of it sticks.

Part of the problem (aside from that damned sax music) is that Jeff Lester and Adrienne Sachs have absolutely no chemistry together. Each is an adequate performer, I suppose — though Sachs is verging on Amateur Hour — but somehow, together, each brings out the inadequacies in the other’s acting ability, like some sort of strange interference-pattern trough. And since the whole rest of the movie is basically them together, we’ve got more than an hour of negative appeal so strong it actually sucks furniture toward the television screen.

Gee, nice of you to show up, Marc, since I only rented this crapper because of your freaking name on the box.

Normally, I’d try to find some way to wrap up the review at this point; it’s certainly not worth the time it takes to summarize it to the end. But remember that I’m reviewing this as part of my Marc Singer Month, so I at least have to fast-forward to the point at which our guest of honor shows up, right? Well, Singer doesn’t show up until the last ten minutes, along with an ostensible explanation for what we’ve been sitting through. I’ll not bore you with details (there’s no reason for both of us to go through that), but suffice it to say that the plot has now suddenly veered into science fiction (imagine if Morpheus had finally shown up to start the plot ten minutes from the end of The Matrix), it was all a setup, and applying the given explanation to the previous events makes even less sense than before. (Sort of the opposite of The Sixth Sense or Fight Club.) Then there’s a pretty bland climax, and we’re finally released from this 112-minute bondage (with credits rolling, naturally, to the tune of a sax solo).

And I don’t know about you, but I’ll feel much better if I simply stop thinking about this movie right here and now.

Some Notable Totables:

(from the R-rated version)

• body count: 0
• breasts: 3
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 7
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 5
  • Jeff Lester (Scott) played an FBI agent in Star Trek 4
  • Brian Thompson (Phil) played the Klingon helmsman in Generations, “Lt. Klag” in the TNG episode “A Matter of Honor,” “Inglatu” in the TNG episode “Rules of Acquisition,” and “Toman’torax” in the DS9 episode “To the Death”
  • John Beck (Rudy, the T-shirt artist) played “Boone” in the DS9 episode “Tribunal”
  • David Soul (Dr. Frieberg) played “Makora” in the classic episode “The Apple”
  • Jack Kehler (the wino) played “Jaheel” in the DS9 episode “Babel”