Although veteran low-budget filmmaker Paul Leder's FRAME UP has a plot-and-a-half worth of action, this busy B-movie never takes off.
The setting is a typical Hollywood version of an American small town: Orton Creek, personal fiefdom of resident evil businessman Will Curran (Dick Sargent). Despite the glaring absence of a college fraternity--or even a college--Curran's nasty son Don (Tom Hodges) and his cohorts conduct a
sadistic hazing, beating a friend to death with baseball bats. Don makes the killing look like a hit-and-run auto mishap implicating mild-mannered traveling salesman Frank Govers (Robert Picardo). Upstanding Sheriff Ralph Baker (Wings Hauser) knows it's a frame-up, because the dumb murderers left
a monogrammed baseball bat at the crime scene, but Govers flees anyway. He's secretly a former 60s student-leftist revolutionary bomber, and afraid to face justice. Govers holes up at a cabin with a fellow outcast, abandoned child bride Lee Anne (Heather Fairfield). A dangerous pair of escaped
convicts invade and take the fugitive hostage. Will Curran--remember Will Curran?--busts his kid out of jail and negotiates with the convicts over the fate of intended scapegoat Govers. Sheriff Baker must save the day, despite a threat from "two carloads of angry dads," as one character puts it.
On the plus side, Leder makes all this comprehensible, but he doesn't instill the film with any great interest or import. Viewers are more likely to be offended than stirred by one sequence graphically juxtaposing Lee Anne's brutal rape with the tender sex between Sheriff Baker and his girlfriend
Jo (Frances Fisher). Occasional patches of well-written or heartfelt dialogue demonstrate that the actors are doing all they can. As he has in other efforts, Leder casts Dick Sargent as a hateful heavy, contrasting his image as a harried husband in the vintage TV sitcom "Bewitched." Less effective
are the odd-couple prison escapees--little smart guy, big dumb guy--more theatrical than scary. The cheap production values give the picture an overall grungy look.
Too competent to be real sleaze, too lowly to be admired, FRAME UP quietly went to home-video obscurity. (Violence, substance abuse, profanity, sexual situations, adult situations.) leave a comment
