The China Lake Murders: Made for TV on VHS

The China Lake Murders

Purchased from a local thrift store in

 April of 2012

The price for VHS cassettes where I usually shop is three for $1.00, but here’s the catch; if you only buy one or two they are .50 cents each!  It must have been a day of slim pickins’ when I picked up “The China Lake Murders” .  In my own defense, in a review on the back of the case, some guy named Richard Zoglin is quoted as saying “Unsettling in the best tradition of film noir”.  I love film noir and am clearly a sucker.  Tom Skerritt stars as a small town sheriff, and hey he was pretty awesome in “Alien” right?  Film noir + Tom Skerritt = $0.33 in my brainulator.

            More research on the title led me to find that this was in fact a made for TV movie.  Further research revealed that this was based on the short “China Lake” (which is apparently pretty good) directed by Robert Harmon, a film which catapulted him into directing “The Hitcher”.  It’s a bit curious how a short film that was essentially made as a resume piece was made into a TV movie, but it was.

          
           I fault the film for its lack of suspense, and general ability to interest.  “China Lake Murders” isn’t  bad, in fact it’s pretty ok, but that’s just it.  It achieves a level of mediocrity that one would expect from say… a made for TV movie… oh wait.  This flick makes no attempt to hide what’s going on, something which one would typically expect from a suspense film.   The acting is actually pretty darn good for what it is; Michael Parks is great as a sociopathic cop who likes to kill people while on vacation. Tom Skerrit is very much the same authoritarian character he plays in everything that he's in, and he's gotten pretty decent at it.  The whole thing is very watchable, but other than Tom Skerritt’s mustache nothing jumps out as incredible. 

Keep on mustachin' in the free world -Wiley

Drop off time and location: Boston MA May 9 Orange Line outbound to Oak Grove.