Blood Crime (2002)

Originally made for television, Blood Crime is a standard crime thriller with a better-than-usual plot. Seattle detective Daniel Pruitt (Johnathon Schaech) goes out to the country with his wife Jessica (Elizabeth Lackey, Mulholland Drive), who is brutally attacked; hysterical, she accuses an innocent man, whom Pruitt beats severely. But when he finally contacts the local sheriff (James Caan, The Godfather, Misery), the beaten man turns up dead and turns out to be the sheriff's son. Now Pruitt has to find the real murderer before the evidence starts pointing to him. The script isn't subtle, and as a larger mystery unfolds, some elements of Blood Crime are a little too convenient--but the tension between Pruitt and the sheriff remains surprisingly taut, the story zips along, and--for the genre--the character motivations are unusually plausible. --Bret Fetzer Amazon.com

BETTER THAN AVERAGE

BLOOD CRIME is a made for USA tv movie that is much better than one usually gets in this genre. Johnathon Schaech delivers a good performance as a cop who tires of being a cop and heads off from his Seattle roots with his wife, played by Elizabeth Lackey. She wants to go camping, so they find a nice little spot and as hubby goes off to a convenience store for snacks, his wife is brutally attacked, almost raped and has to fight her way free. Later, she identifies a local redneck as her assailant, upon which Schaech viciously beats him, but puts him alive and breathing in the back of the truck he was driving, locks the doors and off he goes. Later, when he meets up with the town sheriff (icily played by the always dependable James Caan), he finds out that the guy his wife accused has been found dead, beaten to death, and low and behold, it's Caan's renegade son. At this point, Schaech does some evidence tampering, stealing, etc., to keep Caan from knowing about his involvement with his son.
Caan and Schaech play off each other nicely and Lackey is much better than she was as Dean Cain's wife in "Boa." Director William Graham keeps the plot moving and there are some unexpected twists and turns.
A tight, well wrought tale of vengeance and family dysfunction. April 11, 2004

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