Pun Salad

One of Mrs. Salad's Netflix pix. She loooves John Cusack. But he's not very nice here.

Specifically, he plays Robert Hansen, noted Alaskan serial killer. The movie opens with what should have been near the end: hooker/junkie Cindy Paulson (played by Vanessa Hudgens), frantic and terrorized, tells the cops her tale of horror. Hansen arranged for a simple episode of whoring, but then kidnaps her, chains her up in his den, repeatedly rapes her, and is about to fly her off to a remote wilderness location when she barely escapes.

Unbelievable, but apparently true: the local Anchorage cops do not believe her. Hansen is an unassuming baker, seemingly pleasant, and has an alibi they don't bother to shake. Paulson, on the other hand, is an unreliable junkie who doesn't get along well with cops. So the case goes away.

So it goes, but female bodies keep turning up in the wilderness, all with disturbing forensics suggesting a single perpetrator. A diligent investigator, played by Nicolas Cage, links things up and suspects (correctly) that Paulson has fingered the culprit. But how to get enough evidence to get a warrant?

It's been a long time since Cage and Cusack were in Con Air together. This movie did not make it into A Theatre Near You, pretty much direct-to-DVD. It's a competent police procedural, though.