‘I didn’t make you do anything that wasn’t in you already…’
Despite just squeaking into the ’90s (released in March 1990), Bad Influence is very much a product of the ’80s. It stars two prominent members of the infamous Brat Pack in James Spader and Rob Lowe. It slots nicely into the yuppie nightmare subgenre. The soundtrack is industrial. The main character lives in an apartment that has glass bricks for chrissakes. And in director Curtis Hanson, it has someone behind the camera who knows his way around a thriller…
Michael (Spader) is a mild-mannered but fairly successful young man who just needs a little push to move him up a few extra rungs on the ladder of being of young and upwardly mobile at the tail end of the ’80s. When Alex (Lowe) appears in his life and starts taking charge, it appears that Michael will finally get everything he ever wanted. But at what cost?
Written by celebrated screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man), Bad Influence is a thriller that really thrills. Lowe watched hours of footage of Ted Bundy to research his role and he is suitably chilling as a psychopath here. That winning smile hiding the fact that he is utterly dead behind the eyes. Spader, looking for all the world like Paul Dano, is perfect as the meek mark for Alex’s evil schemes. Hanson, clearly more assured now than in earlier adult thriller The Bedroom Window, casts a noirish pall over the nighttime scenes that contrast beautifully with the garish glare of the various nightclubs, office spaces and liquor stores that make up the rest of the movie. By the time the film races to its barnstorming conclusion I was properly gripped and fully invested – all I ask for a film that labels itself a ‘thriller’.
Bad Influence has been lumped in with the swath of similar yuppie nightmares and adult thrillers that dropped in the ’80s and ’90s and while it shares more than a strand of DNA with stuff like Single White Female and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, it deserves to have endured more than it seemingly has.