Color of Night

Color of Night approaches badness from so many directions that one really must admire its imagination. Combining all the worst ingredients of an Agatha Christie whodunit and a sex-crazed slasher film, it ends in a frenzy of recycled thriller elements, with a chase scene, a showdown in an echoing warehouse, and not one but two cliches from Ebert's Little Movie Glossary: The Talking Killer and the Climbing Villain. Read full review

Where's John McClane when you need him? If nothing else, the main character from the two Die Hard films would have livened up proceedings in this pathetically inept psychological thriller. Read full review

Were expectations running too high for this "erotic thriller" from legendary director Richard Rush, who hasn't completed a movie in 14 years? Or is it really the full-blown fiasco it appears to be? Read full review

You thought brawny Bruce Willis couldn't play a brainy psychologist? You were right. Or maybe it's the idiocy of the movie surrounding him that sinks his performance long before the halfway mark. Read full review

But there is nothing erotic in the coupling between Willis and March, who repeatedly took off her clothes in 1992's "The Lover" to much greater effect. The movie is tepid as a thriller, too, since it's not hard to guess the killer's identity and motive. What's worse is that you don't really care about either, though it is fun to see Willis menaced several times by a red - get it? [18 Aug 1994]

A convoluted psychosexual thriller that promises the moon and gives us Bruce's butt. Read full review

Of all of its lies, the worst may be that Color of Night perpetuates the notion that people who seek therapy are more dangerous to others than those who don't. The film also makes a direct link between sexual appetite and violence. Read full review

This summer's first really bad major movie has finally arrived, and it's time to celebrate. There's been a lot of mediocrity, but until Color of Night there'd been nothing deeply rotten on the grand scale of "Last Action Hero" or "Hudson Hawk." [19 Aug 1994, p.9F]

A plot-twist whodunit that even Forrest Gump might crack, it's also a Hall of Fame howler from long-inactive Richard Rush, whose direction of 1967's Hell's Angels on Wheels now seems comparably placid. [19 Aug 1994, p.10D]

Color of Night is a knuckleheaded thriller that means to get a rise out of audiences, but will merely make them see red. It's confounding and sad that director Richard Rush waited 14 years to make another film after his striking "The Stunt Man," only to choose a script as dismal as this. Read full review

It's sad to see mercurial talent unused, and even more disheartening to see it completely wasted. Color of Night, the first film in 14 years from director Richard Rush, is a dreadful miscalculation of a comeback; a sexual thriller equally lewd and ludicrous. Rush has already disavowed the reworked version opening nationwide today, promising his original vision will be available later on video. [19 Aug 1994, p.7B]