‘I, being of sound mind but broken spirit have decided to take my own life…’
When you’re a kid, you have no concept of what is considered good and what isn’t. You go into everything with a wide eyed innocence and no preconceptions. Now, I can’t remember how I first came across Dead Man’s Curve. I know it was a favourite with my fellow band members from the worst band of all time (shout out to RegAn), but I don’t know how we first came across it. Despite the young cast all achieving some degree of success following this film, Dead Man’s Curve sank without a trace almost immediately upon release. It has eight reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (all negative). I’ve never heard anyone outside of my circle of friends discuss it. For all intents and purposes, this film may as well not exist. Well, in a moment of nostalgic weakness, I actually paid £2.50 to rent Dead Man’s Curve to see how it holds up. The answer? Amazingly well.
Upon hearing that the suicide of your college roommate secures a 4.0 grade average, Tim (Matthew Lillard) and Chris (Michael Vartan) decide to kill their roommate Rand (Randall Batinkoff) in order to get into Harvard. An ingenious premise that is pushed to the limit by a series of ever more unlikely plot twists.
Lillard brings the same dark intensity that he brought to the character of Stu Macher in Scream, all bug eyes and wild improvisations, but it is Randall Batinkoff who provides the best performance here. Rand is a despicable yet magnetic character, and Batkinoff does a great job in keeping him the right side of caricature. Elsewhere, Keri Russell is naturalistic and convincing as Chris’ long suffering girlfriend Emma and Dana Delany steals every scene she is in as the sceptical campus therapist Dr. Ashley.
The influence of both Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino looms large over writer-director Dan Rosen’s script, but rather than coming off as a pale imitation, Rosen takes the pop culture references and the sexual politics and weaves them into something all of his own. It’s a shame that his career in cinema pretty much started and ended with this movie.
Dead Man’s Curve is far from perfect, the ending is a little too ridiculous, a little too contrived, but it absolutely deserves to be remembered with fondness – something that can’t be said about many other ’90s teen thrillers from the same era.