Any movie that begins with a shrieking girl running through the woods, whilst being chased by a maniac with a knife, immediately receives my full and utmost attention. Usually this means the beginning of a vile 80s slasher, but in case of "Murder Elite", the opening sequence is extremely misleading. This is nowhere near a slasher, and the family-drama plot feels as it was plucked out of a TV soap-opera like "Home and Away" or "McLeod's Daughters". Two British sisters live at the family's horse-breeding farm, and the youngest recently returned from America without a single penny left of her father's inheritance. Margaret works hard and respects her family's legacy, while Diane is lazy, sleeps around with the stable boy and wouldn't like anything better than to sell the entire estate. When Margaret stubbornly keeps refusing to sell, Diane persuades her lover to kill her older sister during one of her nightly walks and blame the murder on the maniac who's at large in the area. See, the exhilarating two-minute opening only connects back into the plot at the very end, and out of the four lead characters, it's not too difficult to guess who the secretive murderer is, neither. I really wanted to be more generous for the rating and review of "Murder Elite", but the harsh truth is the quality level never surpasses that of an ordinary episode in a crime/whodunit TV-series. The film is overlong, tedious, talkative, and seriously lacking excitement. Good performances, noticeably from the female leads Ali MacGraw ("The Getaway") and Billie Whitelaw ("The Omen"), can't save the film from righteously having ended up where it belongs: in the 80s horror-oblivion.
(*) User-comment subject title taken from the lyrics "Country House" by Blur.
(*) User-comment subject title taken from the lyrics "Country House" by Blur.