MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Into the Fire’ Fails to Stay Alight

In “Into the Fire,” (citywide), a young drifter with a guitar and a dog shows up at a wintry little town. A sexy waitress steers him to a hired-hand job, working for a cackling, leering brute, whose even sexier wife sports all kinds of strange bruises.

Soon, the drifter is steeped in an ultra-paranoid erotic fantasy: sex in sloppy rooms with two ravenous women while snow lashes the window and passion briefly heats up the dead-of-winter cold. Awfulness piles on awfulness, snow on snow. Murder is hatched, corpses stare out from the frozen lake and unavoidable catastrophe looms in the white, deadly drifts.

To some degree, the makers of “Into the Fire” seem to be going for the same attack used by “Blood Simple,” along with James M. Cain filtered through “Psycho.” Writer Jesse Ballard and director Graeme Campbell juxtapose images of intense eroticism, entrapment and sadism in an overall atmosphere of grungy, seedy doom.

Yet, even though Susan Anspach (as the scheming wife) and Olivia D’Abo (as the pubescent prom queen waitress) are a pair of real temptresses, the movie is mired on a generally low level of soft-core voyeurism and tricked-up gore. After spinning around in a moral vacuum, ruminating on pure evil and the hero’s awesome gullibility, “Into the Fire” (MPAA-rated R for sex and violence) simply and bloodily explodes in the usual guts-and-gore wipe-out, leaving you with nothing but the sour remnants of small-town cynicism and dismembered desire, the frying pan of exploitation movies, and the fire of phony existential Angst.