The Fan

Tacky adaptation of Bob Randall's novel in which (prefiguring the Jodie Foster case) a Broadway star's youthful fan (Biehn) graduates from epistolary devotion to homicidal mania when his overtures receive increasingly curt responses. Since impending shocks are loudly telegraphed in advance, and mainly comprise a series of virtually identical slasher attacks with open razor, the result is crude, nasty and predictable. Sole reason for watching the film is the wonderful Bacall as the toast of Broadway, currently celebrating yet another forty-ninth birthday, curling her basso purr round lines to make their banality sound like wit, and rehearsing a musical (songs by Marvin Hamlisch) that gives her the chance to strut her stuff as a song-and-dancer.