The Mean Season (1985) - Movie Review

What if I told you that American Hero Kurt Russell was in one of the worst serial killer Oscar bait films I’ve ever seen?

Yeah, it’s that bad.

Let’s discuss.

The Mean Season is a 1985 “thriller” brought to us by Phillip Borsos and writers John Katzenbach and Christopher Crowe. If you grew up in the late 80s and earlier 90s, you’ve seen a massive hit from every single one of these guys, except Borsos. Katzenbach was the writer of the novel on which the film is based, but also wrote one of my favorite serial killer films, 1995’s Just Cause. Crowe, on the other hand, is a prolific television writer who was the creator of the underrated sci-fi show Seven Days. Saying all this you’d think I was going to unload on the less than prolific director, but you’d be wrong. Borsos direction was not the problem.

This film is gorgeously shot with incredible use of natural light.

The film focuses on burned out reporter Malcolm Anderson as he returns from vacation to find a new brutal murder waiting at his desk. Planning on giving his notice, his boss asks him to do one more story before he makes a hasty decision. Browbeaten into compliance, Malcolm begins investigating the brutal murder of a young girl. It’s bad enough he has to see the violence and report on it, but things get worse when the killer calls his direct number advising that there will be more murders, and Anderson will have a front row seat. This killer intends on being famous, and Anderson doesn’t have a choice but to play along, but when he begins to focus more on his own fame, and the chance at winning a pulitzer, his life begins to collapse. That friendly killer doesn’t want to share the byline. Will Anderson help the policy solve the murders before it's too late, or will he be another casualty of The Mean Season?

This movie is a rough watch. I almost turned it off, which is saying something because I love Kurt Russel. The filmmakers somehow made an hour and forty-three minutes feel like three hours. If you look at newspaper reviews from the time, the film received mostly positive to mixed reviews, but it doesn’t hold up.

This film aged like processed cheese.

This film has a solid director, a fantastic ensemble cast, but none of that matters if the script is garbage. This script is a lot of scenes that feel like they’re from different films. It’s so scattershot, with so many characters, that you get whiplash. They very subtly imply something in one scene as a possibility, and a split second later we’re in a different location and that subtle implication has now been solved and is concrete fact. The lead reporter reports a man he interviews knows the killer, tells the detectives that he verified all of it before he went to print, and then three seconds later they’re advised that even the most basic details of what he wrote are false. They don’t try to say Anderson lied about verifying, they act like he verified the information, but all of his sources were wrong. It doesn’t make logical sense.

The film spends more time on meaningless exposition than tension or any real character work. There are all-time great actors at work here, and they’re wasted. They try to give some life to this flaccid, dead fish of a script that’s based on boring book that ripoff other popular movies and true crime tales.

This is essentially Son of Sam goes to Miami, with Gemini from Dirty Harry playing the lead.

I mean, that’s the easiest summation. The killer calls to play his little games, but instead of calling the badass detective working the case, he wimps out and calls a reporter instead. It lacks any of the intrigue, stakes, or tension that Dirty Harry had. I get that David Berkowitz’s rampage was fresh in the minds of Americans, but outside of New York, he’s probably one of the least frightening serial killers.

Why? Because he used a gun. A killer who just shoots you, kills you quick—doesn’t excite readers and it sure as hell doesn’t get people to buy tickets. It also doesn’t help that they have the killer randomly change his M.O. halfway through the movie, but then return to the original M.O. It’s not done for any reason other than to artificially inflate what little tension resided in the film. It’s as if someone saw the Son of Sam story on the front of a newspaper page as it flew by them on the beach.. It looks the part, but it lacks any soul.

This film is cut like a tv movie.

Sometimes you can save a film in editing, but not when this editor is working. Scenes just end, horrible overlays of fake newspaper headlines accompany the big story transitions. They look horrible. It can be done well, look at 1959’s Untouchables television series for a good example. It’s a technique utilized since the beginning of film and television.

That’s the crux of the problem with this film. It can’t decide what it wants to be. The musical score is absolute shit. It’s one of the worst scores ever in a thriller. It sounds like Kenny G. rerecorded the soundtrack to ChinaTown from memory. It’s this slow, public domain sounding trash music that you’d expect to hear in a shopping mall elevator.

But hey, the cast is amazing.

This film features some of the pillars of my childhood film watching experience, even outside of the aforementioned Russel. It starts with the legendary Richard Masur, the most likable character actor in history next to Dick Miller. He’s followed by the likes of Richard Bradford, Andy Garcia, Joe Pantoliano, and Richard Jordan. It’s an incredible cast, and really might have salvaged this thing if not for the lead female role being “acted” by Mariel Hemingway.

Mariel Hemingway has never, and will never be able to act.

This film was shot before she had the plastic surgery to make her look slightly more human. I remember her being all over magazines when I was a kid. She was the IT girl for a brief time, and I never understood why. She is like a piece of wood laying across the screen. Her non-verbal skills can be summed up with one word, nonexistent. She either yells or whispers dialogue, of which she was given way too much. I can’t conceive of who thought she was going to be able to carry such a large part of the film, but between her Cro-Magnon posture and single digit facial expression range, she ruins every single scene. It doesn’t help that every actor she shares the screen with gets the same look on their face. A look that tells the audience, “Please… I’m trying so hard, she’s giving me nothing.” All I can think is one of the producers really wanted to see her nude, because the only scene she doesn’t flummox is her nude scene. There’s zero chemistry between her and Russell, and the screenwriter made their relationship the center of the film. Which ended up being the death knell.

Definitely skip this one, unless you want to see Mariel Hemingway’s spectacular tits.

If you do want to punish yourself, the film is available to stream on Prime Video as of this writing.