DEAD ON SIGHT remains engrossing throughout but never transcends the limits of the serial killer subgenre. Confounding viewers with psychic visions, flashbacks, and tricky dream sequences, the film emerges as a superficial blend of JAGGED EDGE, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, and dozens of
other paranoid potboilers.
College professor Caleb O'Dell (Daniel Baldwin), who teaches a course on the patterns of motiveless murder, is obsessed with the unsolved ritual slaying of his wife five years before. Although the crime was pinned on a slow-witted man who was shot down while holding the murder weapon, O'Dell is
quietly accumulating evidence against another man, mild-mannered Stephen Meeker (William H. Macy). Equally obsessed with the thrill-killing is O'Dell's student Rebecca (Jennifer Beals). Traumatized by witnessing the childhood abduction of her younger sister, Rebecca tries to suppress her psychic
gift but begins experiencing visions of murders past and future, including that of O'Dell's wife. When Rebecca senses that a music student, Stephanie (Eleanor Comegys), is about to be murdered by the so-called Clock Killer, O'Dell and his friend Tommy (Kurtwood Smith) scour the campus but are
unable to prevent Rebecca's vision from becoming a reality.
Sheriff Holleran (Kent Williams) dismisses Rebecca as an unwelcome interference. He suspects that O'Dell cleverly murdered his wife in a copy-cat slaying to escape detection. Rebecca has fallen for O'Dell, but she's confused by psychic impressions that suggest he will harm her and begins to buy
the official police interpretation. Foolishly trusting the manipulative Meeker, who offers her protection from O'Dell, Rebecca wakes up from a Mickey Finn to realize that she's been trussed up on Meeker's property. The Sheriff shows up and is choked to death by psychopathic Meeker, but Rebecca
manages to free her hands, poke Meeker in the eye, and knock him out of the window. Meeker chases Rebecca to a lake and attempts to stab her. O'Dell intervenes, saving Rebecca's life. When the injured madman resurfaces, Rebecca shoots Meeker, thus terminating the real Clock Killer.
DEAD ON SIGHT strives mightily to jazz up a conventional crime saga with fractured chronology and spatial dislocations, but its dream sequences inhibit the flow of suspense. Because of the film's reliance on visions in the early stages of exposition, Rebecca's doubt-plagued tenderness toward
Caleb takes a back seat to talky rehashing of the crime spree. Instead of keying in on Rebecca's losing battle against her suspicions, the film shifts gears and triggers a tiresome line-up of suspects, including Caleb's solicitous pal Tommy, the surly Sheriff, and the obviously guilty Norman Bates
clone, Stephen Meeker. While it's relatively successful in concocting a romance between two psychologically wounded spirits, the film compromises the integrity of this love story by allowing Rebecca to trust Meeker so completely. Her about-face isn't borne out by any previous event. Too often in
this contrived narrative, credibility is sacrificed in order to direct suspicion toward everyone but Meeker. Still, the chemistry between Baldwin and Beals comes close to compensating for dramatic weaknesses. (Graphic violence, extreme profanity, extensive nudity.) leave a comment
