Far from Home (1989)
6/10
How is it that someone can be so right and still be so wrong?
2 April 2005
Warning: Spoilers
**SPOILERS** On the open road going back to L.A from a trip that covered the entire southwest Charlie and his soon to be 14 year-old daughter Joleen, Matt Frewer & Drew Barrymore, end up in the little and isolated Navada town of Banco out of gas and out of luck.

With the local gas station dry and no deliveries expected the Charlie & Joleen step right into a serial killer on the looses who's eying young Joleen with a weird love-at-first-sight obsession. The killings start as soon as Charlie and Joleen arrive in town with the local food-mart manager found dead in his store with his brains blown out. It turns out later that the killer has this psycho-like fixation that leads to his murderous rampage during the movie. It's Joleen who somehow, without her knowledge, gets to keep those feeling submerged by replacing the love and affection that his mother is no longer able to give him.

Drew Barrymore's in what is considered to be her first adult role, even though she was 13 at the time,is much better the you would have expected as the sweet and naive Joleen. Joleen with the killer, after he's revealed to the audience, for the last half hour of the movie with her dad Charlie and the local Sheriff Bill Childers, Dick Miller, leaving her alone with him thinking that they have the real killer in custody.

Alone and together the killer plays a strange and deadly cat-and-mouse game with the unsuspecting Joleen who's so in love with him that she wants to stay and doesn't want to leave town and go back home to L.A. Were given the usual suspects in the film to who the murderer really is and as usual he's the one thats the least likely of the bunch. The movie "Far From home" is very slow moving until the final sequence but it's doesn't lag or drag itself along. It's nicely paced without an overabundant supply of blood gore and victims like most slasher-like films, like itself, were back then in the 1970's and 1980's.

Chasing Joleen up this TV tower the killer is finally shot and killed by one of the locals in town Duckett ,Richard Masur, as he fell to his death on top of a large satellite dish. We get an explanation to the deceased murderers mindset by Duckett that ties up a lot of the loose ends in the movie. There's nothing really great about the film, unless your a Drew Barrymore fan,but it does hold your interest and the acting is a cut above what you would expect in a movie like "Far from Home".
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