A few years after it played the international festival rounds, this tricky, sweaty, little thriller finally gets a British release. It's one of those films in which a familiar supporting player - Miguel Ferrer, best remembered as the arrogant pathologist from Twin Peaks, but also a useful villain in everything from RoboCop to Another Stakeout - is given a rare chance to hold a whole movie together. Always watchable, Ferrer makes a nicely paranoid noir hero and seizes on his cynical dialogue with relish.
It opens with a montage of poured whiskey, fingers on a word processor keyboard, sweaty facial areas and an imagined murder on a combine harvester, then proceeds to send washed-up screenwriter Charlie Pope (Ferrer) to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico to get involved in a series of mysteries which may or may not be part of a tough guy script he is writing. Loosely based on the story of a tourist who wakes up after a bender to find himself less a kidney, the film nicely plays off a nervous American's nightmare about corrupt South-of-the-Border hellholes and the writer's desire to rework any given story to make him sound like a studly hero.
It is a touch too hot and slow to be really exciting, but Ferrer is supported by an excellent batch of untrustworthies, from Leilani Sarelle (Sharon Stone's girlfriend in Basic Instinct and Ferrer's real-life wife) as the femme fatale and Henry Silva as a monstrously crooked Mexican cop to such stalwarts as Harvey Fiorstein (a sneaky producer), Tim Thomerson (a bloated deadbeat) and Matt Clark (a doomed hayseed). It can't quite cut it alongside, say, The Usual Suspects, but it's a solid example of the vanishing breed of decent B pictures.