You’ve got to love finding those little movies with stars before they got big.  This one’s a pretty bland East Coast-lensed psycho-thriller, and it probably would have remained unreleased if it weren’t for the star, Christian Slater, who filmed this in between The Legend of Billy Jean and The Name of the Rose.  As it is, it took five years to hit video, where it was promptly ignored some more.
The mid-teen Slater plays Mark, a high school student who’s just moved into town with his folks and kid sister.  He copes with this sudden change of scenery by promptly offing his caretaker in the opening scene.  As if this isn’t enough to prove he’s a bit on the wacky side, he also (1) listens to classical music, (2) is obsessed with Nazis, (3) wears a suit and tie to school, (4) spies on his parents’ conversations by rigging the house with bugs, (5) kills cats, (6) drives recklessly, (7) experiments on rats, (8) causes his science experiment to fall on a local bully and, most importantly, (9) is Christian Slater.
    Anyway, his parents are oblivious to most of these facts, and they don’t suspect him of any foul play because the caretaker was old and fat(!).  In fact, they don’t even ask the kids if they noticed her falling down the stairs, nor do they bother telling them that she died!
    Struggling to find a replacement sitter for a Saturday night in a new town, mom (Hume Cronyn & Jessica Tandy offspring Tandy Cronyn) meets an older woman (Lois Smith) at the grocery store who immediately bonds with the little sister.  Smith, looking for a way to get out of a party of her own, agrees.  They’re not aware, however, that their new sitter just got back from being sent “away” after the mysterious death of her mother.
    So before you can say “Gaslight,” Mark begins playing mindgames with his newfound prey.  Throw in the high school bully looking for revenge and a cute little kitten in peril and you’ve got a standard cable potboiler.  It all leads to a pretty typical conclusion, albeit one with some relatively interesting moments on the way.
    While Slater and Smith do decent jobs in their leads, Slater hadn’t really established much of a screen persona yet, and it merely seems like a warm-up to his Heathers character.  It doesn’t help that he’s given way too many screen psycho clichés to properly become a convincing character, either. The supporting cast is a bunch of cut-outs, straight out of The Stepford Wives but without that film’s sense of irony, though Mercedes Ruehl is apparently in there somewhere.  The pacing needs work, too; in order to become feature length, it seems the director just asked the actors to pause for as long as possible between lines of dialogue.
    Twisted isn’t the sort of mind-numbing embarrassment a star hopes to have buried deep in their past (like, say, Sally Field in Beyond the Poseidon Adventure), but it’s not much of a find, either.  It’s just a simple curiosity,  probably only of interest to those who actually own a copy of Kuffs.