Not an Episode - No Place to Hide (1992)

Sometimes we get super-stoked about a movie that sounds like it’d make for a great episode of WHM, then it turns out we’re totally wrong and the schlock we just slogged through is… Not an Episode!

I stumbled upon this title after creeping on the IMDB profile of the film’s writer/director, Richard Danus. It turns out that Danus, who wrote an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that we covered on The Nexus, a Star Trek re-cap show we do over on WHM’s Patreon, also happened to write and direct a feature film in the early 90s, No Place to Hide. Since Danus’s episode of TNG we covered was great, “Deja Q,” I had some hope that this film would be, if not good, at least entertaining to some degree.

At first glance, it seemed like a total no-brainer for WHM fodder: You have a 1992 Kris Kristofferson playing a damaged L.A. detective with a dead family (shock), a teenage Drew Barrymore on the run from people trying to murder her, and a cult that’s supposedly running all of Los Angeles? Plus, it was the only time Mr. Danus here was ever asked to direct anything, so how could this miss? Not to mention, it starts with the most promising production company logo your eyes can spy when seeking out a bad movie:

As it turns out, the film itself is way more outrageous on paper than on screen. Things start out kind of promising with this opening at a ballet rehearsal where a mysterious figure sneaks backstage and starts whispering to one of the dancers from behind a curtain. The creep, whose face we don’t see, convinces the dancer to walk backstage where he confronts her, says something about “owning” her or some such, and then stabs her to death… right there in the wings where apparently no one else was around?

The murdered ballerina is Pamela Hanley, played by Lydie Denier who was known for portraying Jane on the live action Tarzán television show at the time, the older sister of the ridiculously named Tinsel, played by Barrymore. Now with her sister dead, Tinsel is left an orphan and winds up, after several obnoxious sequences, under the protection of Kris Kristofferson’s Detective Joe Garvey.

Speaking of Garvey, I’m reminded that one of the most grating parts of the film is that the whole thing is tied together by a narration from Barrymore where she says either “Joe Garvey” or “Garvey” so many times, I was ready to scream. It’s all framed around Barrymore’s character writing in her diary basically everything that’s going on in the movie. Let’s just say that Joe Gillis, Tinsel is not.

As annoying as Barrymore’s character is throughout the entire thing, the most frustrating turn is Kristofferson’s tired, checked-out performance as Garvey. Dude could not give a shit about being in this movie and it totally shows. He mumbles out his lines at such a bored pace, it’s slow even for Mr. K., and when he’s supposed to be mean and grumpy toward Barrymore’s 14 year-old orphan character, he sounds like he’s falling asleep. Thinking to just a few years later when he’s going toe-to-toe with Wesley Snipes & co. in the first Blade film, it’s like night and day.

But the biggest let down is this whole ‘cult’ thing. Here’s how the IMDb plot description describes it: A tough L.A. cop and the teen sister of the ballerina whose murder he's investigating become targeted by a sinister cult that secretly runs the city.

So, okay, a sinister cult running Los Angeles behind the scenes? My mind was running WILD with the possibilities. What was going to go down? More murders? Blood sacrifices? A wild ceremony scene at the end? Whatever I thought was going to happen with this cult, I was way off. Instead, the cult only really shows up at the last big scene, lead by a totally lost Martin Landau as Frank McCoy (Kristofferson’s boss or something) explaining to Garvey that there is a small group of Angelenos who go around killing people that have escaped the long arm of the law. Oooooookay!

In the film’s dreadful parlor scene, Landau drags out a guy named Weller, someone we already know to have killed Garvey’s wife and daughter in a drunk driving accident thanks to some bad flashbacks, and tells Garvey that Weller never faced punishment by the law, so now the cult has kidnapped him in order to let Garvey get his own justice. Weller, by the way, is played by Jason Voorhees himself, Kane Hodder! So that was something.

The biggest bummer about this film not really being episode fodder is that there’s a couple scenes with O.J. Simpson, just a few years away from murdering his wife and her friend in cold blood, playing a friend of Kristofferson’s named Allie Wheeler, an ex-football player (shock) whose career ended after a spinal injury left him paralyzed and needing to use a wheelchair. The movie wastes no time letting us know he’s an ex-football player, but we don’t know anything else about this guy, like how he’s friends with Garvey or why it is Garvey thinks he’s totally equipped to protect Tinsel from the hit squad that keeps coming after her? Only plus to that whole sequence is Simpson’s character getting shot in the face by an assassin. Classic stuff.

So, like always with WHM show research, better luck next time! I wish there was more to this, but what starts out as a weird, giallo-feeling, L.A.-set crime story, ends with Garvey sort of adopting Tinsel and Kristofferson more or less just sighing into the camera—and you better believe I was sighing right back.