Colour Of Night Review

Psychiaitrist Bill Capa (Willis) is distraught after the suicide of a patient. He goes to LA to visit an old friend, but when he is murdered, Capa must take over his therapy group - one of whom, he believes, is the killer…

by Clark Collis |
Published on
Release Date:

28 Sep 1994

Running Time:

123 minutes

Certificate:

18

Original Title:

Colour Of Night

It is a sad fact that, the critical success of the likes of The Sixth Sense and Pulp Fiction notwithstanding, Bruce Willis is running out of movie genres in which he has not top-billed at least one turkey. Presumably in an attempt to explore areas where his reputation is, as yet, untainted, with Colour Of Night Bruce moves into the psycho-erotic whodunnit.

Willis plays New York psychologist Bill Capa who, after seeing a patient leap to her death from his office window, heads L.A.-wards to visit old buddy Dr. Bob Moore (Bakula). Unfortunately Bakula is swiftly despatched to the great couch in the sky by an unseen, knife-wielding assailant. The late doctor had suspected one of his therapy group (which includes Brad Dourif, Lance Henriksen and Lesley Ann Warren) of sending him death threats and Willis reluctantly takes charge of the patients in an attempt to find out which it might be. Along the way, he chokes back the tears long enough to engage in explicit hanky panky with the mysterious Rose (March) who may, or may not, have a walk-in wardrobe of skeletons to hide.

Director Richard Rush, who in a previous life was responsible for The Stunt Man, does his best to cobble together the film's various roles - psycho-drama, murder-mystery, porn flick - into a relatively cogent, sub-De Palma whole, but it's hard not to regard this as another woeful addition to the canon of Willis stinkers.

The result is a film that isn't so much bad as bizarre with Willis disastrously miscast as a gun-hating trauma victim and the kind of ending that even the writers of Scooby Doo wouldn't dare contemplate.
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