Black Day Blue Night

The Review

A tarantula crawls across a desolate road. An unmarked police cruiser speeds through the desert. When the two travelers finally intersect, the Chevrolet's draft flips the arachnid. The spider rights itself and continues its journey.

This opening scene from Black Day Blue Night mirrors the movie's plot. Writer/director J. S. Cardone puts three characters into purposeful motion. Halfway through the film, an unexpected—and, unfortunately, unmotivated—"flip" occurs. Like the tarantula, the surviving characters get up and continue on their way, but viewers should expect to feel less invested in the outcome. Recovering from the tumble—and trusting the storyteller again—will prove difficult.

The first character we meet is Rinda Woolley [Michelle Forbes], a young woman with impulse control issues. What is good in the moment is what Rinda pursues, whether it is Barbie blond hair with a drugstore bottle of dye [which makes her dark coif orange], passionate sex with a man she hardly knows [whose wife shoots her way through the motel room door], or quitting her job in a rage [and without a polite two week's notice]. Rinda interjects profanity and physical punctuation into every impulsive action, like unleashing fry-cook fu on the patrons and their vehicles as she departs Hop Chung's Cafe.

When Hallie Schrag [Mia Sara], the betrayed wife, asks for a ride, Rinda agrees, perhaps to atone for her contribution to the adultery. With no good music on the radio, Rinda turns to Hallie for conversation and learns that her companion is both an orphan and a victim of domestic abuse. We have our doubts, for Hallie's face does not have the wear acquired from watching a mother drink herself to death, and her body [which we will soon see in all its glory] has not a single mark on it.

When a thunderstorm strands Rinda's ancient Cadillac in the mud, the women encounter Dodge [Gil Bellows], a drifter hugging a mysterious suitcase. Impulsive Rinda invites him along, and the three decide to detour to a spring-fed canyon where they swim, drink, and swap stories about their disappointing childhoods. When Dodge chooses Hallie for sex—perhaps because she bares all in an artless presentation of female breasts—Rinda continues to California alone.

Interrupting Rinda's drive west is Lt. John Quinn (J. T. Walsh). Quinn is a lone-wolf Provo detective investigating the robbery of an armored car and murder of one of its guards. Two suspects died when their getaway car hit a cow, but the third is still loose with one million dollars in his possession. When Quinn discovers Rinda used a marked $20 bill to buy gas and was traveling with a hitchhiker, he offers a $10,000 reward for Dodge's whereabouts. The huge sum seduces Rinda, who leads Quinn back to the canyon.

Once there, without any motivation or explanatory back story, Quinn kills Rinda and a fellow law enforcement officer, reveals that he is the third robber in the heist, and demands his money, convinced that Dodge must have happened upon the accident scene and "stolen" it. As Quinn tries to get Dodge to reveal the money's location [it's not, alas, in the mysterious suitcase], Hallie admits that she has the cash and shoots Quinn dead. The tumble has occurred.

Quinn is not the real villain of this movie—the bad writing is. If Cardone wanted this film to become a low-budget gem for audiences to discover and love, then he needed to give the story, not Sara's breasts, more attention. Logic leaks from big holes in the plot, each of which Cardone could have plugged with a line or two of dialogue.

For example, Rinda needs a compelling reason to betray Dodge for the reward money. She already had a chance to turn him over to law enforcement when, at a gas station, a sheriff was inquiring about hitchhikers, but she protected Dodge by pretending to be his wife.

The plug for this hole is easy. During their get-acquainted conversation, Hallie should have asked Rinda, "So what's in San Diego?" Rinda could have answered, "A woman whose tastes I couldn't afford." Making Rinda bisexual would fit her look: sexy, straight cowgirl from the waist down with the bare legs and work boots, and cute lesbian butch from the waist up with the plaid flannel shirt and short hair. She would then have a good reason for wanting the money, and bisexuality would give the scenes in the canyon much more tension as Rinda competed not only with Hallie for Dodge but also with Dodge for Hallie. With just her acrobatic eyes, Forbes could have had Rinda roll from interest in the boy one moment to the girl the next.

The second problem is that Hallie has not a mark on her despite her husband's beatings and surviving a car wreck that left two people, a cow, and a vehicle broken and bloody. Again, the fix is easy. At some point, Hallie should have disrobed enough for Rinda to notice bruises. That's when Hallie should have asked, "Did he hit you too?" Blaming the bruises on an abusive husband [when she really acquired them from the accident] would have made a nice feint. A seat belt across her torso during the accident flashback would explain why she wasn't thrown from the vehicle as were the other two occupants.

The biggest hole is that Quinn has no motivation to rob an armored car and murder a guard. His boss does worry that he's "gone squirrely" but offers no explanation for the comment. If the chief had just added, "He hasn't been the same since Louise started chemo. I sure wish insurance would pay for that experimental treatment," then we could understand why a good cop had gone bad.

Just as the tarantula crosses more quickly after its tumble in the Chevrolet's wake, we want the end to hurry up and arrive before we get flattened by another big inconsistency racing our way, Cardone at the wheel.

Video Teasers

You can view scenes from the movie at YouTube.

To Own the Movie

You can buy a VHS copy of Black Day Blue Night from a Marketplace Seller at Amazon US or an "all regions" DVD from Amazon UK or Alibris. Despite the "all regions" guarantee, my copy from Alibris would play only in a computer DVD drive.

Cross Post

This review also exists at Amazon US.