"Bad Influence" is an example of that sub-genre of the thriller which I have come to think of as the "
. from Hell" film. The basic plot of such films is that a stranger comes into the life of the hero. At first this stranger seems affable and friendly, but quickly reveals himself or herself to be a dangerous criminal or psychopath, and the hero finds that he is in danger. The genre is an old one; this is, for example, the plot of Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train". It was, however, given a new lease of life in the late 1980s and 1990s by the success of "Fatal Attraction" (or "One-Night Stand from Hell"). Other examples include "Pacific Heights" ("Tenant from Hell"), "Single White Female" ("Flatmate from Hell") and "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle" ("Nanny from Hell"). This last film, like "Bad Influence", was directed by Curtis Hanson. There are also elements of the "
. from Hell" plot in "The River Wild", another Hanson film from the nineties.
The plot of "Bad Influence" can be summarised as "Bloke-you-meet-in-a-bar from Hell". The hero, Michael is a young business executive, the sort of person who in the eighties or nineties would have been described by the now-dated slang term "yuppie". Yuppies during this period were normally characterised as pushy, aggressive, go-getting types, but Michael is anything but. He is a wimp who lacks self-confidence and allows himself to be pushed around at work by his unscrupulous colleague Patterson, his rival for an important promotion, and at home by his domineering fiancée Ruth. (Marcia Cross in the days before she became a desperate housewife).
One evening Michael tries to chat up a girl in a bar, and is saved from being beaten up by her jealous boyfriend by a mysterious stranger, a young man named Alex. (Interestingly enough, the female antagonist in "Fatal Attraction" also bore this same unisex Christian name). Alex not only befriends Michael but also encourages him to be more self-assertive. Under Alex's tutelage Michael finds the courage to stand up to Patterson. Alex also engineers the break-up of Michael's relationship with Ruth, something which does not unduly concern him, partly because he was never really in love with her, partly because Alex finds him a new girlfriend, a sexy good-time girl named Claire.
And then, of course, it all starts to go wrong. It always does in films of this nature. Alex turns out to be not only a criminal but also completely mad. Under his influence Michael takes part in two armed robberies, following which the two men break into Patterson's home and beat him up. Michael, alarmed at the way things are developing, tries to end his association with Alex, only to find that Alex is not a man to take no for an answer. He not only steals all of Michael's possessions but also murders Claire and leaves her body in his apartment. Not that Alex has anything in particular against Claire; he just wants her dead so that he can frame Michael for the murder.
Well, it's not just Michael's life that's going Pete Tong. The film itself has been teetering on the edge of absurdity for some time, and it is around this point that it stops teetering and plunges in headfirst. Hanson and his scriptwriter have ignored two cardinal rules of the "
.. from Hell" movie. The first is that the hero or heroine must be someone with whom the audience can identify. Michael Douglas's character in "Fatal Attraction", for example, may have been guilty of a moral lapse when he cheated on his wife, but he nevertheless remains an Everyman figure with whom we can sympathise, someone being punished excessively for a single error of judgement. James Spader 's Michael, by contrast, is less an Everyman than a prize jerk. Someone who will happily participate in no fewer than three violent felonies as some sort of virility test suggested by a casual acquaintance can only be described as both mentally and morally defective.
The second rule that the film ignores is that, in the most successful "
.. from Hell" movies the villain must also be someone whom the audience can at least understand, even if they cannot identify or sympathise with him or her. Both Glenn Close's Alex in "Fatal Attraction" and Rebecca de Mornay's Peyton in "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle" commit evil deeds, but both are motivated by very understandable, and all too common, human emotions, sexual jealousy in the first example and desire for revenge in the second. Rob Lowe's Alex is not motivated by anything other than an insane urge to commit crimes at the behest of the scriptwriter in order to make the film as lurid and sensational as possible. Alex's character might have been more comprehensible had the film explored in greater depth the latent homosexual attraction which is implied between the two men, in which case his villainy, like that of his female namesake in "Fatal Attraction", could have been explained as the result of anger following rejection by a lover. Even in the nineties, however, Hollywood could often be coy about turning gay subtext into gay text- see also "The Talented Mr. Ripley", etc- and this angle was never pursued.
I watched this film largely because it was directed by Hanson who also made the excellent "L.A. Confidential", perhaps the best neo-noir of the nineties, and was also responsible for good thrillers like "The River Wild" and "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle". "Bad Influence", unfortunately, is just not in the same class. It is an over-the-top, implausible thriller whose ostensible hero is nearly as unsympathetic as its villain. 4/10
