Dave heads to Texas for a lacklustre small screen thriller with an all-star cast.

“Galveston, oh Galveston,” wrote Jimmy Webb in 1968 – and that’s a fair representation of my despondent reaction to telepic A TASTE FOR KILLING, which is set in and around the iconic port in Southeast Texas.

Perhaps Daniel Munoz’s summary in The Detroit Free Press might entice you more: “Love Boat meets Unlawful Entry (1992)”. A description that’s reaching for sure, but it at least gives a flavour of the ungainly marriage between such ill-suited bedfellows.

Wealthy Blaine Stoddard III (Jason Bateman) and Cary Sloan (Henry Thomas) are two college buddies who have recently graduated. Both of their fathers are high profile lawyers, so the pressure is on to follow suit. In the meantime, though, they’ve booked high-paying summer jobs on an oil rig in order to gain a little experience of the real world. Befriended by Bo Landry (Michael Biehn), the seasoned roughneck teaches them the tricks of the trade and ensures a relatively smooth induction amid resentment from some quarters. “You’re taking jobs away from men who need them,” comes the dissenting voice of Elray Phelps (Blue Deckert): a man whose eventual murder exposes Bo as a crazed killer.

“Somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, the devil just made two new friends” boasts the tagline, but even Beelzebub would have a hard time corrupting these bland souls. Empathy is low from the get go, with both Bateman and Thomas seeming nonplussed by the whole affair. The latter is particularly underwritten and only sparks to life with a bizarre confession: that he once walked in on his father having sex with his girlfriend.

Biehn’s murderous ne’er-do-well – a double denim wearing pied piper – is undoubtedly the best thing about Lou Antonio’s film, which finds Dan Bronson’s script stuck between stations, refusing to commit to either relationship-based melodrama or nasty psycho-thriller. It’s a surprising flaw given the pedigree of the Princeton educated screenplay analyst, story editor, and occasional script doctor – noted for his tweaks on the likes of Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995).

Filmed over half a dozen weeks during March and April 1992, A Taste for Killing had a speedy six month turnaround to nail its 12^th August airdate on the USA Network. A compact runtime means that it’s by no means a chore, and the Zapata oil rig it’s shot on provides some nice visuals. However, in a year that saw the USA Network hit its stride in terms of original content, this has to be marked down as one solely for the channel’s completists.

USA ● 1992 ● Thriller, TVM ● 83mins

Michael Biehn, Jason Bateman, Henry Thomas, Helen Cates, Renee Zellweger ● Dir. Lou Antonio ● Wri. Dan Bronson, story by Allen Rucker & Hudson Marquez