Vitals

Val Kilmer as Jack Andrews, cynical private investigator

Nevada, Spring 1989

Film: Kill Me Again
Release Date: October 27, 1989
Director: John Dahl
Costume Designer: Terry Dresbach

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

This summer’s Car Week wraps with Kill Me Again, John Dahl’s little-known (at least to me, before last year) 1989 neo-noir thriller starring the late Val Kilmer and Michael Madsen opposite Kilmer’s then-wife Joanne Whalley as a dangerous femme fatale.

I’ll admit I was drawn to this as a subject this week due to some stylistic similarities with one of my favorite “car movies”, Vanishing Point (1971), which also features a man in a white shirt and jeans desperately racing a white two-door hardtop V8 through the desert until the car meets a fiery end. In this case, it’s not the nihilistic Kowalski in a Dodge Challenger but our widowed gambler P.I. in his quarter-century-old Cadillac, racing through the sand for a bundle of stolen cash. Continue reading →