DVD 110 mins IMDB 6.8

In Collection
#83

Drama

Mary Stuart Masterson	Terry
Chris Penn	Tommy Whitewood
Sean Penn	Brad Whitewood Jr.
Millie Perkins	Julie
Eileen Ryan	Grandma
Christopher Walken	Brad Whitewood Sr.
Tracey Walter	Uncle Patch Whitewood
R.D. Call	Dickie
David Strathairn	Tony Pine
J.C. Quinn	Boyd
Alan Autry
Candy Clark
Jake Dengel
Stephen Geoffreys
Crispin Glover
Christopher Penn

Director	James Foley
Producer	Don Guest; Elliott Lewitt; John Daly; Derek Gibson
Writer	Nicholas Kazan; Elliott Lewitt

One of the overlooked films of the 1980s, perhaps because it is such a downbeat tale of an amoral family. Sean Penn plays a kid whose small-time criminal impulses are stoked to a new level when he falls in with his father (Christopher Walken), a vicious career criminal for whom no problem is so large that it can't be solved by a murder. At first exhilarated by the attention from his father (and the jobs he gives him to do), he gradually catches on to just what a bad guy Dad really is. But when he tries to extricate himself, he discovers that Dad now has him squarely in his sights. Penn is terrific in a role of emotional complexity, while Walken, king of the creeps, is positively frightening as this soft-spoken but highly lethal patriarch. --Marshall Fine