Watching Christine Lahti act opposite Dylan McDermott and Jennifer Rubin in a made-for-Showtime movie called ”The Fear Inside” is like watching Michael Jordan play ball against a couple of grammar school hot shots.
Lahti is so gracefully artful while the younger two are so loudly awkward that she is almost able to salvage this film from its manipulative mission.
But she can`t. ”The Fear Inside” (8 p.m. Sunday and other dates in August on the premium cable network) is a strangely stylized movie that sets Lahti up as Meredith Cole, a successful children`s book illustrator and the mother of a young son, who is separated from her husband. She`s also an agoraphobic, which means that she has an abnormal fear of open spaces and is unable to leave her home.
That house, stuck on the heavily forested mountainside, is a lavish manse. It is so huge and sumptuously appointed that it`s hard to believe that Cole would have to make ends meet by renting a room to a boarder. But that`s what she does, renting to the first person to show up.
Jane (Rubin) is a wild-eyed but smiling sort who is soon joined by her
”brother.” Peter (McDermott) says he`s a cop and starts an obvious flirtation with Cole.
Jane and Peter are far from siblings, for we soon see them entangled in the sheets with nude body parts flashing in that obvious-meaning gratuitous and rarely sexy-way. In relatively short order, Cole discovers the pair`s deviousness, while also finding the huge diamond they stole from their previous hostess, along with that foolish woman`s severed finger.
Trapped by the pair and by her agoraphobia, Cole can`t escape, even though she has the chance and even though her ”house guests” are getting increasingly nutty.
”There`s fun and games,” Peter says to Jane when she`s embarking on some sort of demented sophomoric shtick. ”And then there`s real life.”
Unfortunately, director Leon Ichaso doesn`t know the difference. He plays all sorts of visual games to the detriment of any real tension or terror that might have resulted from such circumstances.
As the film progresses, each of the characters becomes increasingly disheveled, as if their anxieties and fears were manifesting themselves physically. Rubin gets especially weird looking, with her hair a fright wig of Don King`s electrified style and her eyes afire.
Cole finally overcomes her fear and saves herself and her son. But that does little to make me feel that this film wastes a fine actress.
– A new and potentially interesting weekly cable program begins at 6:30 p.m. Sunday with the premiere of ”You and the Law” (Chicago Cable Access Channel 19). The brainchild of Chicago Bar Association President Thomas A. Demetrio, the program will feature such ”legal stars” as Chicago Corporation Counsel Kelly Walsh and Illinois Atty. Gen. Roland Burris in discussion with Demetrio about law-related issues.
The first show will examine the Americans With Disabilities Act: its history, purpose and effect. Among the guests will be Marca Bristo, founder and president of Access Living.
