Never Talk To Strangers - Playing with fire
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Never Talk To Strangers - Playing with fire |
| Original title | Never talk to strangers |
| Country of production | USA , Canada , Germany |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1995 |
| length | 86 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Peter Hall |
| script |
Lewis A. Green , Jordan Rush |
| production |
András Hámori , Jeffrey R. Neuman , Martin Wiley |
| music |
Pino Donaggio , Steve Sexton |
| camera | Elemér Ragályi |
| cut | Roberto Silvi |
| occupation | |
| |
Never Talk To Strangers - Playing with Fire (Original title: Never Talk to Strangers ) is an American - Canadian - German thriller from the director Peter Hall from 1995. The main roles are Rebecca De Mornay and Antonio Banderas .
action
The psychologist Dr. Sarah Taylor is tasked with finding out whether serial killer Max Cheski suffers from multiple personality disorder and cannot be declared sane . One evening in a supermarket she meets the attractive Puerto Rican Tony Ramirez. Sarah, who has a hard time trusting men due to a childhood trauma, first lets him down, but then gives him her phone number. When she comes home with her purchases, her father unexpectedly appears at the door. He hopes to be able to spend the night with her. Sarah doesn't want that and gives him money for a motel.
Sarah finally agrees to meet Tony. In his apartment, he tells her that he used to work as a police officer. He's now selling safety devices. Sarah, in turn, tells him about her ex-boyfriend Benny and about her mother who was accidentally shot when Sarah was five years old. Tony and Sarah then lie in each other's arms until dawn, after which they sleep together. They then meet more often, go to the hustle and bustle together and fall in love.
When Sarah one day receives flowers of the dead and an anonymous letter draws attention to her own obituary notice in a newspaper, she believes that her patient Max Cheski was behind it. Shortly afterwards, she receives a package with her dead cat. A police officer advises her to contact a private investigator. When Tony stops by and wants to know why she hasn't called him anymore, he meets Sarah's neighbor and old friend Cliff Raddison. He suspects Tony is trying to drive Sarah insane. The fight breaks out, whereupon Tony Cliff forcibly removed from Sarah's apartment. Sarah eventually goes to a private investigator and puts him on Tony, with whom she continues to meet and have sex. When Tony has to travel to Boston on business , he is pursued by the detective. It turns out that Tony actually travels to Albany , where Sarah is from, and then to New York, where he greets a woman and a little girl at the airport. Sarah now believes Tony is married and has a daughter. Neighbor Cliff, meanwhile, watches as a hooded stranger sneaks out of Sarah's apartment. He runs after him and is then knocked down with an iron bar.
In Tony's apartment, Sarah finds photos of herself and documents that show that he has been watching her for a long time and that she accidentally shot her mother as a child. In her apartment she then finds graffiti on her bedroom wall. As she takes a bath and gets out of the tub, a loosely screwed heater falls into the water, which was apparently supposed to kill her. After another statement to the police, Tony shows up with her. She immediately tries to call the police, but stops when Tony draws a gun. He explains that the woman at the airport in New York was his cousin, who is also Benny's sister. Sarah's ex-boyfriend Benny disappeared eleven months ago and Tony wanted to find out what happened to him. When he became suspicious, he secretly installed a video camera in her apartment. He's now forcing Sarah to watch a videotape. When Sarah recognizes herself as a masked stranger on the video recording and is confronted with stalking herself, she goes crazy and hits the TV with her fist. Suddenly her father is in the door, whereupon Sarah remembers how her mother actually died. Her mother and father once got into an argument after Sarah repeatedly sexually abused. Sarah's mother was then pushed down the stairs by the father and died. The father then forced Sarah to shoot her mother with a pistol in order to shift the blame on Sarah.
When Sarah comes to on her bed, she picks up a gun and aims at her father. Tony tries to calm her down and puts his own gun on the floor. Still disturbed, Sarah first shoots Tony and then her father with Tony's gun. Then she pushes Tony's gun into his hand and makes the murder of him look like self-defense. She destroys the videotape and is then shocked by the bloody incident. In her office, after giving evidence to the police, she speaks on her dictation machine and explains that multiple personality disorders are mostly caused by sexual abuse in childhood. The recovered Cliff is happy that it is all over and that Sarah is herself again.
background
The shooting took place from mid-December 1994 to mid-February 1995 in Budapest and Toronto . On October 20, 1995, the thriller hit US cinemas, where it grossed just $ 6.86 million. Similar to the erotic thrillers Body of Evidence (1993) and Color of Night (1994) Never Talk To Strangers - Spiel mit dem Feuer could not build on the enormous success of Basic Instinct (1992). In Germany, the film opened in cinemas on February 8, 1996. On May 24, 1998, ProSieben showed it for the first time on German television.
Reviews
The lexicon of international films spoke of a “chamber-play staged psychological thriller”, which “relies on numerous prefabricated parts and clichés” and “does not combine them again without skill without shining with really original ideas”. Compared to the setting of “the modern American city”, the staging seems “conventional and conservative”. The film “lacks inner credibility and logical density, especially towards the end”. Cinema said that the viewer who "holds out the lame story to the end [...] will be 'rewarded'" with a finale that is downright ingenious. The conclusion was: “Beautiful stars in beautiful bullshit”.
According to Caryn James of the New York Times , Never Talk to Strangers is not "overly bad" but "lame and predictable". The end is simply "idiotic". Variety found the film "quite entertaining". However, it is an "extremely uninspired erotic thriller". The scenes in which the protagonists wear clothes are "not nearly as exciting as the sex scenes". Rebecca De Mornay offered “an intense, moving performance” and she and Antonio Banderas had “proven once more that they are not lacking in sex appeal”. However, Banderas' role is "too fraught with Latin lover clichés".
Web links
- Never Talk To Strangers - playing with fire in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Never Talk To Strangers - Playing with fire at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
- Pictures of the film on cinema.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ cf. boxofficemojo.com
- ↑ a b cf. cinema.de
- ↑ Never Talk To Strangers - Playing with Fire. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ^ “ Never Talk to Strangers is not aggressively bad, just slack and unsurprising. [...] Eventually the story arrives at an idiotic ending. " Caryn James : Never Talk to Strangers (1995) . In: The New York Times , October 21, 1995.
- ↑ “ Never Talk to Strangers is a reasonably entertaining but largely uninspired erotic thriller [… T] he fully clothed drama isn't nearly as enthralling as the steamy scenes […]. De Mornay gives an intense, affecting perf as the repressed psychiatrist, and De Mornay and Banderas provide further evidence that they're not lacking in the bigscreen sex-appeal department. But Banderas has less to work with as Ramirez, a character saddled with far too many Latin-lover cliches. " See Review: 'Never Talk to Strangers' . In: Variety , October 23, 1995.