Crew
Director – William Lustig, Screenplay – Jack T.D. Robinson [Phil Alden Robinson], Producer – Howard Smith, Photography – James Lemmo, Music – Jay Chattaway, Special Effects – Guy Faria, Production Design – Gene Abel. Production Company – CineTel Films.
Cast
Leo Rossi (Detective Sam Dietz), Judd Nelson (Arthur ‘Buck’ Taylor), Robert Loggia (Detective Bill Malloy), Meg Foster (Carol Dietz), Patrick O’Bryan (Todd Arthur), Ron Taylor (Captain Blakely), John F. Goff (Dr Park), Ken Lerner (Arthur Taylor), Mindy Seeger (Francine), Brendan Ryan (Corey Dietz), Harriet Hall (Angela Taylor), Angel Tompkins (Carmine), Beau Starr (Ike Taylor), Matt Bolduc (Young Back – 7 Years), Edward Bunker (Lieutenant Cardoza)
Plot
Police detective Sam Dietz has relocated from New York to Los Angeles along with his family so that he can take a position on the LAPD. On the job, he is partnered with older detective Bill Malloy. They investigate a murder scene where they find the body that has been left with a page torn from the phone book and the victim’s name and address underlined. Behind the killings is Arthur ‘Buck’ Taylor who is targeting people whose name resembles his own. As the police uncover other murders, Sam wants to use modern behavioural methods to find the killer but is frustrated by the traditional-minded Malloy’s dismissal of his methods.
William Lustig is a director with a certain name in exploitation cinema. After making a couple of porn films in the 1970s under a pseudonym, Lustig made the notoriously violent slasher film Maniac (1980). Lustig followed this with Vigilante (1982) and Maniac Cop (1988), which he thn spun out into a trilogy with the amazing Maniac Cop II (1990) and Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence (1992), and the horror film Uncle Sam (1997). Lustig has now retired from directing and manages a distribution label for exploitation films. Lustig made Relentless for CineTel, a prolific producer of low-budget action and horror films.
I had heard about Relentless for years. It had even produced a string of sequels (see below). Eventually, I decided I had to get around the watching it to see what the fuss was all about. The great disappointment I found is that Relentless is no more than a regular Police Procedural that follows a duo of detectives as they track a serial killer. Although the genre has disappeared from cinema screens this side of the 2000s, police procedurals were popular as films during this era – the Dirty Harry series is no more than such, for instance. Relentless proves routine in this regard.
What is interesting is that Relentless came out just before the sea change that overtook the genre with The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which introduced FBI behavioural profiling in the hunt for a serial killer, and spawned a great many copycats. Relentless is one of these Serial Killer Thrillers in all but name, although predates The Silence of the Lambs. It joins several other police procedural works of the day that had plots of a detective tracking a serial killer – see the likes of Dirty Harry (1971), The First Deadly Sin (1980), Fear City (1984), Tightrope (1984) and Cop (1987) – although all of these others used traditional policing methods.
One of the more interesting aspects of the plot is that hero Leo Rossi is depicted as a newbie who is trying to employ advanced behavioural methods to track the killer, while this keeps getting belittled by old timer Robert Loggia in favour of regular, dogged police work. All of this would change dramatically in the next couple of years. The ideas of behavioural profiling on screen are clearly still in their infancy – here Leo Rossi does at least consult a psychiatrist (John F. Goff) about the killer’s behaviour, but his insight amounts to no more than giving a shrug “Maybe he’s crazy.”
As a police procedural and a detective story film, Relentless is not very interesting. It feels like no more than an average tv cop show episode of the day. The one thing it does have is former Brat Packer Judd Nelson, who is top-billed. Quite a bit of time is spent with Nelson’s killer and the scenes where he stalks and attacks victims – much more so than you get in most policiers – and even flashbacks to his childhood. The rest of the film though is less ‘relentless’ than it is ‘sedate’.
Relentless produced three sequels Dead On: Relentless II (1992), Relentless 3 (1993) and Relentless IV: Ashes to Ashes (1994). All three feature Leo Rossi’s detective hunting different serial killers. William Lustig departed the series after this point and each of the sequels is handled by a different director.
One of the most interesting names on the credits is Jack T.D. Robinson, a pseudonym for director/writer Phil Alden Robinson. The same year as this, Robinson has a huge breakout with his second film as director, the delightful and award-winning baseball fantasy Field of Dreams (1989). Robinson would go on to other mainstream works as director with the likes of Sneakers (1992) and The Sum of All Fears (2002).
Trailer here