HEAVEN’S PRISONERS is a new-to-me ’96 joint. I was vaguely aware that it’s based on a book, and I think somebody recommended it to me at some point in my life, though it seems to have gotten terrible reviews and was also a flop. Alec Baldwin (THE SHADOW) plays Dave Robicheaux, a recovering alcoholic former New Orleans homicide detective, now living “back on the bayou selling worms and all that jazz.” One day he and his wife Annie (Kelly Lynch, ROAD HOUSE) are on their boat, about to get out the air mattress to fuck on, when a small plane swoops down and crashes in the water right next to them.

They heroically leap into action to try to rescue the passengers, but the only survivor is a little girl from El Salvador (Samantha Lagpacan), who they assume is “an illegal” and “immigration is gonna send her right back” so they decide to off-the-books adopt her and name her Alafair after his mother. She doesn’t speak English, they only speak a tiny bit of Spanish, and don’t make much of an effort to change this, so the subject of didn’t she already have a name she could be using never does come up. I feel like she probly had a name she’d been using up to that point though.

DEA agent Minos P. Dautrieve (Vondie Curtis-Hall, ONE GOOD COP, FALLING DOWN, BROKEN ARROW) shows up at the house, giving Dave hints that he needs to stay quiet about one of the bodies he saw on the plane, who he surmises was a drug smuggler. Instead of scaring him off it makes him decide to investigate what happened. Just when you thought you were out…

Clues lead him to a strip club called Smiling Jacks, where luckily his old girlfriend (mistress?) Robin (Mary Stuart Masterson, RADIOLAND MURDERS) dances. She has enough affection for him that she gives him intel and doesn’t blame him when somebody breaks her finger for it. The bartender Jerry (Tuck Milligan, OF MICE AND MEN) has a grudge against Dave for putting him away once so he narcs him out and he gets jumped by Toot (Carl A. McGee, BLOODFIST VI: GROUND ZERO) and his partner Eddie Keats (Don Stark, SWITCHBLADE SISTERS, 3 NINJAS KICK BACK). I thought Eddie literally kicked Dave in the asshole, but it turns out to have been hitting the balls from behind, like Seagal did to that dog abuser in OUT FOR JUSTICE. Anyway there’s a whole series of incidents of Dave questioning people and then guys coming after him and then him going back after the guys.

The dead guy and most of the criminals around here work for the druglord Bubba Rocque (Eric Roberts, BEST OF THE BEST I and II). The thing I like best about this movie is the character of Bubba and his relationship with Dave. They grew up together so Dave just goes to his mansion to talk to him, finds him sparring in a backyard boxing ring. And I’m the type of guy who likes to see Eric Roberts playing a character where he does an accent and has his hair braided and ponytailed. While Dave tells him about his situation they sit down for a drink (iced tea for Dave) and a giant platter of shrimp, and they act like old friends. They even hug at the end. I kept expecting it to be an act on Bubba’s part, intimidating Dave with insincere charm, but I think the twist is that they actually do like each other and would prefer to work things out.

I love that Bubba interrupts their discussion to chastise his wife Claudette (Teri Hatcher, TANGO & CASH) about always leaving rings on his tables with her gin rickey Thermos. He’s really upset about it.

When this turns out to be information Dave needs to solve the mystery and not just a funny detail about Bubba’s personality I felt a little let down, but it’s still a funny touch. Dave doesn’t remember Claudette from growing up in New Iberia, thinks it’s his first time seeing her when he drives up and she’s standing casually naked on the balcony, eyeing him. Obviously there will be sexual tension, etc.

It’s Baldwin in his Basinger era, so he’s effortlessly handsome, but mixing it up by doing his version of a Lousiana accent, having an unexplained slash of white hair on the back of his head (earning him the nickname “Streak”), opening with a long monologue in a confession booth about about how much he misses drinking but “it fucked up my life” and he’d lose his wife if he started again. Well, don’t worry, halfway through (spoiler) they kill his wife, so he gets to start back up again. It’s a role where he beats people up and gets beat up and solves a mystery and also has a heartbreaking scene where he’s in denial about his wife being dead. His buddy (employee?) Batist (Badja Djola, Half Dead from PENITENTIARY) has to tell him she’s gone and he says “She is?”

I think it’s kind of a mess and not a good movie, but it’s just unhinged enough that I can’t help but feel a slight affection for it. It’s that feeling some movies have, where you can kinda tell it’s based on a book, and that it must not really be capturing it, but at least the source material gives it some odd bits of character and setting specificity, and license to try some kinda crazy shit.

(Well, I’m not sure anything gives him license to smack Claudette at the end. That’s unlicensed.)

The character of Annie seems exciting at first, and she lasts too long to say she gets “fridged,” but she does quickly get sidelined, having to watch the kid and worry about Dave. His relationship with Robin is a little more interesting. He gets her in trouble but then goes out of his way to repay her, she gives him some genuine support in starting a new life as a widower, but he gets distracted by Claudette waving her tail around. That’s Dave for ya.

From what I remember the media coverage of the movie focused on Hatcher. The penultimate season of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman had just ended, she’d hosted Saturday Night Live a month earlier (musical guest: Dave Matthews Band), she was kind of becoming America’s sweetheart, and this was calculated way to challenge her image. A Sunday Mirror article was positive about her insistence on doing the nude scene, which it says she fought from being cut, but they used the headline “Is it a bimbo? Is it a dame? No, it’s that super girl Teri!” I was very much not surprised to read that she got a Razzie nomination for “Worst Supporting Actress.” I can’t really defend her performance that much, but this definitely fits the Razzie tradition of flagrantly misogynistic punishment of women who have the audacity to be naked and/or beautiful in movies.

I think the move worked for Hatcher’s career, though – a year later she was FHM’s “world’s sexiest woman” and beat out Monical Bellucci to play a bond girl in TOMORROW NEVER DIES.

HEAVEN’S PRISONERS is directed by Phil Joanou (THREE O’CLOCK HIGH), and the adaptation is credited to Harley Peyton (LESS THAN ZERO, THE THREE MUSKETEERS) and Scott Frank (between GET SHORTY and OUT OF SIGHT). It’s the first feature shot by cinematographer Harris Savides, who had come out of music videos. He died tragically young at 55 but had done six movies with Gus Van Sant, two with David Fincher, two with Noah Baumbach, two with Sofia Coppola, one with Ridley Scott and one with Jonathan Glazer. Not bad.

So it looks good, and this is one of those nineties movies that reminds us how in those days even a mid-level thriller could have craft and production value. There are underwater stunts, a gunfight during a lightning storm at night, a chase across rooftops… Hey look – it’s the KILLER OF SHEEP/Mos Def The Ecstatic shot!

The chase ends in a fight on a weirdly fast moving street car, where the mostly white passengers support Dave pulling a gun on Toots without any context. I suspect it’s not meant as a statement, but I’ll take it as one.

I really don’t know what the title means. The book is by James Lee Burke and it’s actually the second in the series, after The Neon Rain. There are 25 books total, and Tommy Lee Jones played the character in an adaptation of #6 called IN THE ELECTRIC MIST. Somebody once recommended that to me too. Hmm.

Summer of ’96 connections: There’s a part where he’s out of it laying in a boat like William Blake at the end of DEAD MAN.