Linda Blair, whose career has gone from THE EXORCIST to exploitation fodder like CHAINED HEAT, SAVAGE STREETS, and REPOSSESSED, stars in this unsuccessful couple-on-the-run melodrama made in Australia.
In a suburban bar, Leoni (Blair) picks up handsome stranger Joe (Jerome Ehlers), a drifter on the run from the police for "unpaid parking tickets," and takes him home with her. Instantly in love, Leoni quits her job as a beautician, sells her car, packs up, and heads north with Joe. In the
seaside resort of Manly, Joe tries to pick up teenager Bree (Penny Pederson), much to Leoni's annoyance. They drive north again the next morning, just as Bree's body is fished out of the ocean.
Detective-Sergeant Chenko (Caz Lederman) and Detective Greaves (Roger Ward) question Bree's distraught, religion-obsessed father, Anthony Boon (Steven Leeder), and son Shane (Teo Gerbert). Using a photo Bree had taken, Boon follows Leoni and Joe, who finally arrive in Springvale. Here, Joe works
in a steal-to-order car ring with his brother Jack, and buddies Rocky (Donal Gibson) and Claw (Joe Bugner). Joe finds his brother and sister-in-law dead and accuses Claw; in the confrontation, Rocky saves Joe's life by shooting Claw, but is run down by Claw's out-of-control car.
Fed up with her lover's unfaithfulness and violence (a few more bodies have turned up, which she takes to be the work of Joe), Leoni prepares to leave, but is interrupted by the increasingly berserk Boon ("I am the instrument of the Lord's punishment"). As the couple try to escape, Joe is
trapped by Boon in his wrecked car, just as Chenko and Shane arrive to accuse Boon of his daughter's murder ("She was a slut just like her mother"). Leoni pulls Joe free and Boon sets fire to the car and himself. An end-title crawl informs us that "After the trial, Joe married Leoni, bought a
caryard, and settled down. They now have seven beautiful children."
From the initial premise through to this last, outrageously straight-faced bit of where-are-they-now information, most of FATAL BOND simply fails to work. However gullible and hard-up she may be, we never for a second believe that Leoni would team with a demonstrably borderline psychotic like
Joe. And there's nothing in the performances of either Blair, or the charmless Ehler, to make these characters believable, let alone sympathetic. (Blair, who does some nudity here, might consider securing a new agent.) The rest of the acting is equally tiresome.
Phillip Avalon's crudely structured screenplay incorporates too many coincidences and awkward, undeveloped subplots. The direction by Vince Monton (a former cinematographer helming his second feature, after the better WINDRIDER, with Nicole Kidman) is stodgy and slow-moving, overestimating
audience interest in the dysfunctional aspects of the Boon family. Technical credits are adequate but unexciting, with the cinematography doing little justice to the beautiful beaches north of Sydney where most of FATAL BOND was shot. The soundtrack features a slew of nondescript rock tunes,
including the end-title song "Night Runner," written and sung by Kevin Johnson, who plays himself in the opening bar scene. With its 1991 copyright, the film was barely released in its native Australia and came out direct-to-video in the US. (Violence, nudity, sexual situations, profanity.) leave a comment
