Ostensibly shot in only seventeen days, and with a scant budget of less than half a million dollars, this exercise from the cinematic Theatre of Paranoia is similar in tone to many other low cost works of Roger Corman, executive producer for this effort that is filmed largely in and near the Wilshire area of Los Angeles, but although a suspenseful mood is maintained throughout, a plot having little relevance to logic cripples the affair. Julia (Kim Delaney), a clothing designer driving from a fashion showing in San Francisco back to her home in Los Angeles, through the misguidance of lust picks up a hitchhiker, Trey (Miles O'Keefe), and spends a night of carnal pleasure with him in a motel, only to discover that her attraction to this man, although plainly genuine, is going to cause severe problems for her because he begins to stalk her at her home and place of employment. When Julia's best friend, who is staying with her following a breakup with her fiancé, is murdered in their apartment, Julia becomes terrified that Trey's designs upon her may be more malign than amourous, and as an attempt to have him removed from her life, she calls upon her local police department for assistance, there meeting Detective Morrison, played by the film's director and screenwriter Larry Brand, who thereby assumes a critical role as the film approaches its climax that also engages Julia's first-string lover, Arthur (Timothy Bottoms), in addition to a private investigator that Arthur has hired to follow her due to his suspicions regarding possible inconstancy on her part. In spite of a steadily worsening storyline and an ending that is completely ludicrous, director Brand paces the action skillfully, therewith maintaining a viewer's interest that is heightened even more by a good deal of attention that is given to detail, while the cinematography and the editing of David Sperling and Stephen Mark, respectively, are valuable visual contributions, but unplanned presence of microphone booms, attention disturbing jump cuts, and erratic sound quality that too often shields dialogue from being comprehensible, all combine with the shabbily constructed script to drop the production into the extensive catalogue of unmemorable films.
Review of The Drifter
